- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Abbotsford
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $146,571.88
- Government Page
- Feb/7/23 4:16:33 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am glad the member quoted Milton Friedman. Of course, that member, being a member of the Liberal Party, is a great disciple of John Maynard Keynes, who used to promote spending as a way out of governments' problems and spending as a way of getting an economy back on track. Unfortunately, it is spending that has gotten our economy off track and into an inflationary spiral.
Will that member not admit that the spending his government undertook in Canada has driven inflation to 40-year highs and has caused the current unaffordability crisis in Canada? Will he now, at least, admit that?
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- Dec/5/22 3:04:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canadians face the worst affordability crisis in a generation, yet the government is only making things worse by spending $54 million on the ArriveCAN fiasco, $6,000 a night for the Prime Minister's luxury suite in London and $1 billion in wage subsidies to wealthy corporations. Liberal waste has become a national embarrassment, and every time the government borrows and spends on waste, life becomes more unaffordable for Canadians.
Will the government finally put an end to this inflationary spending, yes or no?
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Madam Speaker, let me begin by saying that I will be splitting my time with the member for Peace River—Westlock.
This motion and the underlying Bill C-31 are effectively an admission of failure by the Liberal government when it comes to the economy and fighting inflation. To be very clear, Bill C-31 is setting up a national dental care program focused on children; it also provides for 500 dollars' worth of rent relief, which does not go very far nowadays in most of our cities. That is what this does.
I want to focus on the term “relief”. Why is relief even required in the first place? Something went wrong in the economy, so that the government decided, “Listen, we are going to have to borrow more money and send out cheques, because Canadians are suffering and falling behind.”
Why are they falling behind? There is a very clear reason. Inflation is rampant. The government did not get hold of the problem of inflation in a timely way.
I will be the first to recognize that there are different things that have affected the inflationary pressures within Canada. We know the global community has suffered from a COVID pandemic, which has disrupted everything in our lives. Our lives have been changed, actually, forever by the COVID pandemic. A pandemic had not been experienced for over 100 years, and suddenly it was at our doorstep.
Sure, that contributes to inflationary factors. Supply chain disruptions that occurred, the war in Ukraine and weather-related challenges, whether they are drought and famine, storms and hurricanes, or heat domes in British Columbia, all contribute to inflation.
However, there is one big factor that is very clearly in the control of the Liberal government, and that is its spending and its borrowing.
Here is a factoid that a lot of Canadians are not aware of. Are members aware that over the last seven short years, the Liberal government has spent more money than all previous governments in Canadian history combined? That's going back from 1867 all the way to 2015. The Liberal government, in the subsequent seven years, has spent more money than all of those governments combined. Now we know there is a problem.
Some of that money was required to support Canadians in their time of need during the COVID pandemic. That was a crisis that required a government response, but much of that spending was not actually COVID-related. We know that because the Parliamentary Budget Officer said so.
The spending this government did has now accumulated a national debt somewhere in the order of $1.5 trillion. If the spending that has brought us to that point, much of which was not COVID-related, was effectively money that was pumped into the economy, then more dollars are chasing the same number of goods and services, and that drives inflation. Every credible economist will tell us that. If a nation's productivity is not improving, which in Canada it is not, but it is pumping more liquidity into the marketplace, that is going to drive inflation.
I challenge the government to show me the steps it has taken to discipline and to restrain spending, and the borrowing that was required to sustain that spending, much of which was not COVID-related.
That is the first challenge I throw out to my Liberal friends. I ask them to explain to me where the plan is to control spending, that reckless spending that has taken place. Also, by the way, where is the plan to return to balanced budgets? Where is the plan to start repaying that massive debt that we have accumulated over the last few Liberal years? I ask them to explain to me how they justify to future generations of Canadians this massive debt, in an environment of increasing taxes and increasing interest rates, that their children and grandchildren are going to have to repay. I cannot defend that to my children. I cannot.
What is even worse is that much of this COVID spending, the amount that was invested in relief and support programs, came through programs like CERB. They were poorly designed, so yes, fraud took place, much more fraud than should have taken place. The programs were designed in such a way that people who did not need the support got the support. I can speak from personal experience. I have had constituents come into my office to tell me they applied for some of the benefits, such as that loan program of $60,000 that they did not actually need, and that now they have to pay only $40,000 back, because $20,000 is forgiven. They asked why they would not apply for it if they qualified.
Why did Canadian businesses and individuals who actually did not need them receive benefits during the COVID pandemic? During the COVID pandemic, because people had to stay at home, some businesses catered specifically to that kind of situation and made a ton of money. They had never made profits like that before, yet they applied for these benefits and received them from the Liberal government. That is a failure.
Then there is a question that has to be asked about a government that cannot fix its passport system, a government that cannot deliver passports on time, a government that botches the ArriveCAN app and pays $54 million for that app when the private sector says it should not have cost more than $1.5 million or $2 million, and a government that came up with the failed Canada Infrastructure Bank and the CERB program. I could go on and on about these programs that were absolute failures and that the government could not deliver in an efficient and accountable manner. How is it that the government now expects to roll out a $10-billion national dental care program? Nobody in this country trusts the government to manage that, to do it in a coherent and accountable way.
Bill C-31 is effectively a band-aid solution to an underlying problem that is much more significant, which is a failure of the Liberal government to address the underlying causes of inflation. Effectively, Bill C-31 camouflages the real problem, which is incompetence on the part of the government on the economic file, its inability to understand that it needs to control its wild borrowing and spending because that is what is driving inflation, at least in part.
I will be fair, as I said at the beginning. Some of the influences on inflation are not within Canada's control, but a very significant component is, which is its spending. My challenge to the Liberal government is to get its borrowing and spending under control. Then it might gain some credibility with Canadians when it rolls out these expensive programs, multi-billion dollar programs that are going to saddle future generations with permanent obligations. It should not do that to future generations. Canadians expect better.
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Madam Speaker, that was quite an introduction to my speech. It basically took all the oxygen out of the House.
Let me start by saying that this bill is effectively the budget implementation act, which would implement a portion of the last federal budget, budget 2022, which was tabled just over a month ago. Not surprisingly, after having given this much thought, considered it and looked at all the different elements of this particular bill, as well as the budget itself, we as the Conservative opposition have no choice but to oppose it. I will tell the reasons why.
When I spoke earlier to the budget itself, I highlighted the fact that there were a number of issues we took very seriously. One was that, contrary to expectations, it was not a growth budget. In fact, it was very much like the previous budget in 2021, which was panned by the Liberals' own former advisers, who said that the claims that that budget was a growth budget were actually profoundly wrong. In fact, it was a spending budget. It turns out this budget, budget 2022, is also a spending budget.
Why can I say that it is a spending budget? We know the figures, and the officials have confirmed them. There is somewhere in the order of $57 billion or $58 billion of new spending in this bill. That is not just carrying over from the previous year or established programs simply carrying those forward. This is, on top of that, $57 billion more that the government would spend.
I believe we need to place this all in context because the government took over some six and a half years ago in 2015, and over those six and a half years, and members will not believe this, spending has grown 53%. To put this into further perspective, just between 2019, so just before the COVID pandemic, and today, spending has increased by 25%, so by all measures this is a tax-and-spend Liberal government. Canadians should not be surprised. That is the reputation they have earned over many decades.
Is this a growth budget, which is what it was supposed to be? It was intended to be about fundamental changes that were going to improve the prospects for long-term growth for our country. About the growth we are seeing in the economy today, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has said that growth is actually “GDP inflation.” In other words, it is not organic or substantive growth that is generated by improving productivity within the economy that would improve our competitiveness on the world stage and the global marketplace.
For example, there was nothing in this budget about comprehensive tax reform, which would clearly position our tax system as being fairer, making sure the wealthy pay their share, and also position Canada to be competitive within the global marketplace. Such a tax system would attract investment from all around the world, because today Canada has a reputation of being a place people do not invest in. They shy away. It has too much regulation. Taxes are too high. There is no certainty that the investment will ever be approved, and it has a federal government that is not supportive of this investment, certainly not investment in our resource sector and certainly not investment in our oil and gas sector.
This is also not a growth budget because there is nothing in it about regulatory change or about regulatory reforms that would speed up the approval process for worthy projects. That just is not here.
There is nothing in this budget about interprovincial trade barriers, which have bedevilled governments for many, many decades. It is tougher to do trade among the provinces and territories than it is to do trade with some of our free trade partners around the world. What a sad comment on the performance of the government, which had nothing in the budget or in this bill that addresses that serious problem.
There is nothing in the budget that addresses Canada's lagging investment performance. In fact, Canada is at the bottom of the list of the 38 OECD countries when it comes to investment performance. Investors from around the world just do not see Canada as an attractive place to invest.
I want to hearken back to a comment that the finance minister just made. She made it seem like Canada's growth rate is the best in the world. There is nothing to see here. It is all great. “Don't worry, be happy.” In fact, she quoted the IMF, which said that Canada is going to have a good growth rate for a couple of years.
Do members know what the OECD has said? Canada ranks 38th of 38 countries when it comes to expected future growth of our economy over the next 30 to 35 years, between 2030 and 2060. Canada will be at the bottom of the list of the developed countries of this world. That is a failure on the part of the Liberal government. This is not a growth budget. The prospects under the government are bleak when it comes to future growth.
Second, let me address the issue of inflation. Inflation is the biggest challenge to Canadian families today. The affordability crisis stretches from coast to coast to coast. Yes, there are external influences that have driven inflation from around the world, supply chain challenges and spiking commodity prices, but the government has to take responsibility as well. Economist after economist notes that governments cannot keep spending and spending and pumping more money into our economy without paying a price, and that price is the inflation we see today, especially in our housing market. The housing affordability crisis is as severe as I have seen in my lifetime. It has never been so bad in this country. Right now, the government cannot give Canadians any hope that things are going to get better in the near to mid-term.
The problem is this. The Liberals had something in their budget called a housing plan. They said they were going to pump $10 billion into Canada to help ease the housing crisis, but $4 billion of that is simply a transfer from the federal government to municipalities across the country. It will not create one extra house in Canada. It will not build one extra house over the next few years. It is going to be used, purportedly, to help the municipalities improve their application processes, to make sure they are more efficient, more timely and speedier, so they can get more permit approvals out the door, but that is going to take years to manifest itself. I think we all in the House know that this is not a quick fix.
The other $6 billion from this $10-billion fund is going into a program that will allow first-time homebuyers to set up a savings plan where, over a period of five years, they can invest $8,000 per year for a total of $40,000 in an account that has tax-deductible investments into the fund and one can take money out tax-free. It sounds great, but it is only $40,000 and it is over five years.
Over five years, these families are going to be left far behind by a housing market that is raging out of control. To boot, that program is going to increase demand for housing in Canada even more as more Canadians take advantage of this. We are going to have a problem on the demand side and a problem on the supply side of housing in Canada.
The real challenge here in Canada is the housing crisis itself, and the inflationary aspect of it is a made-in-Canada crisis. Some of the elements that go into our home construction would be impacted by global forces, but for the most part, housing inflation in this country is a made-in-Canada crisis. We had the Governor of the Bank of Canada, Tiff Macklem, at our committee not long ago and we specifically asked him if it was possible that some of the inflationary spending that the federal Liberals had done, the borrowing and spending, with record deficits and record debt, could be contributing to housing inflation. He admitted that yes, that was true. Housing inflation can be driven by excess liquidity in the marketplace.
It is not available to the Liberal government to simply wash its hands of the inflation crisis besetting our country and afflicting homes across this country. It has to take some ownership and responsibility for a crisis of its own making. It is not solely of its own making, I will be the first to admit, but it is significantly of its own making.
That was the cost of living, and of course it is going to get worse because on one side we have inflation. How do the Bank of Canada and Mr. Macklem fight inflation? He now has to increase interest rates. At committee last week, he admitted he was going to have to do that quickly and that the increases in interest rates would be significant.
Now we are between scourges afflicting families across this country: on one side, we have skyrocketing inflation, and on the other side, we have rising interest rates. Canadians who have mortgages that are due for renewal are going to be paying higher mortgage rates. That means higher payments, which in turn mean less disposable income for those families. That is the story and the legacy of the Liberal government.
I will go to the third problem that we see with this budget and this bill. The finance minister was expressly directed by the Prime Minister, just over a year ago, not to engage in any more new permanent spending. That was in the middle of the COVID pandemic, and the government I thought had realized that we could not keep spending. We need to discipline spending because, at the end of the day, we also have a duty to future generations of Canadians who have to pay back this massive debt that has been incurred because of the COVID pandemic and because of the government's reckless spending.
Instead, after receiving that clear directive, a year later what did the Prime Minister do? He gave the finance minister another mandate letter in which he purged any reference to eliminating new permanent spending. I do not know. Maybe the Prime Minister already knew that he was cooking up a coalition between the NDP and the Liberals, that it would cost taxpayers a lot of money, and then the government would have to borrow a lot of money to satisfy the NDP. I do not know that, but I do know this.
Shortly after the finance minister received that mandate letter, she started crafting her 2022 budget, which introduced a massive amount of new permanent spending, including a dental care program. In the last budget, it was a child care program. In the next one, we expect there will be a pharmacare program.
What was shocking to me, as a member of the finance committee, was the process when all of these requests were pouring in as we did our pre-budget consultations. There were stakeholders from across Canada. Five hundred written submissions came in, and many more witnesses were basically asking the government to fund this program or that program or to give them this subsidy or that subsidy. We asked the other members of the committee if we could at least go through a process of prioritization and triage all the requests flooding in, so that we could bring a critical eye to them to determine which ones were actually affordable for Canadian taxpayers and future generations, who would have to pay the bill.
The Liberals, NDP and Bloc said that they were not interested in prioritization. They wanted to take all the recommendations and send them up to the minister to see what she would do with them. What a reckless way of doing business. That is not the kind of country I want to live in. I want to live in a country that is fiscally responsible. I want to have a Prime Minister who actually thinks about monetary policy, not who shuns it and says it is something that does not concern him.
It is the monetary policy of this country that is requiring interest rates to go up because of the reckless borrowing and spending of the Liberal government. That is the permanent spending part of it. There is $57 billion of new spending just in this budget alone, and that will saddle future generations with an albatross. It is a huge indebtedness that they are going to have to pay back with rising interest rates.
The last point is taxation. The Liberal government often talks about having Canadians' backs and being there for the middle class. “Hear, hear,” they say, yet the budget is tax after tax. It is unbelievable. Look at the escalator on wine excise taxes, for example. It is unbelievable. The escalators automatically drive up the taxes on goods that Canadians purchase every single day. It is tax after tax. What is worse is the fact that with the dramatic escalation in the price of gas at the pumps, Canadians who already had a tough time filling up their tanks are now realizing, because we Conservatives are telling them, that on top of that gas price, they are paying GST, which means more revenues for the federal government but less disposable income for them.
We, as Conservatives, brought forward a proposal, because we are solution-oriented. We are problem-solvers on this side. We came forward to the Prime Minister and said that we could at least temporarily suspend carbon taxes and temporarily suspend the GST on gas so we could give Canadians a break. The Liberals said no.
Let me close by saying that there is no way the Conservatives, the official opposition and the loyal opposition, can support a budget bill that is irresponsible. I have a motion that I would like to table in this House.
I move:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “that” and substituting the following: “the House decline to give second reading to Bill C-19, an Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on April 7, 2022 and other measures, since the bill fails, among other things, to address inflation, provide tax relief for Canadians and take immediate action to increase housing supply.
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- May/2/22 10:26:00 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to chime in on this debate again. Bill C-8 is actually a piece of implementing legislation that arises out of the biggest spending budget in Canadian history, namely budget 2021, which was tabled well over a year ago. That budget set a record because the Liberal government had not tabled a budget for well over two years, which is something that has almost never happened in Canadian history. Budgets are intended to be tabled every single year to give Canadians a picture of what their finances look like and a picture of what the government wants to spend their hard earned tax dollars on and how much the government is going to borrow to try to deliver the services Canadians receive.
Bill C-8 is coming out of the biggest budget ever seen in Canada. It has over half a trillion dollars' worth of spending in one year, and members can think about that. It ended up doubling Canada's national debt. That is how big this budget was, so members can understand why it was critical that the official opposition, which is the Conservative Party, and other opposition parties in this House had an opportunity to exercise oversight over this huge budget.
Of course, a budget in itself is not legislation. It is simply the government's statement of what it intends to do the following year. The government brought forward this budget document, then over the subsequent months of 2021, it began to roll out enabling legislation. First it was the budget implementation act, then different pieces of legislation after that. Along the way the government also tabled in the House something called a fall economic statement, which gives Canadians a six-month update on where the finances of the nation are and what the government still plans to do arising out of the budget.
Out of that process has come this bill, Bill C-8. Again, it is a bill that spends well over $50 billion of taxpayers' money, much of it borrowed, by the way. Members can understand why we are reluctant to force this through the House of Commons. Members will understand why we are reluctant to ram this thing through without proper oversight and accountability, yet it is the Liberal government that, every step along the way, has tried to do exactly that. It has tried to push this along faster that it should be. In fact, the Liberals have accused us of delaying this bill, when all we have done is exercise proper oversight, which is something the Liberal government really hates.
I look back at the mandate letter the finance minister received from the Prime Minister just over a year ago, and that mandate letter actually had a specific provision in it that said that the government was seeking to be transparent and accountable in everything it did, including when it came to budgetary matters. In fact, that was the direction to the finance minister. It was for her to be as transparent as possible with the finances of this nation, yet we see here the Liberal government doing everything it can to push through legislation that requires proper oversight.
Let me place this in a larger context. I have already mentioned the fact that the government has embarked upon the largest spending spree in Canadian history. In fact, over the last year or so it has doubled the national debt, if members can imagine that, and since it was elected in 2015, the government has increased spending by some 53%.
Since 2019, which was before COVID, the government has increased spending by 25%. For most household budgets in the country, if they tried to increase their spending like that, they would have to go to their local insolvency specialist and say, “Hey, listen. We cannot meet our payments anymore. Please help.”
However, with this government, it is spend, spend, spend. It is a Liberal tax and spend problem that this country has gained since our former Conservative Party lost the election in 2015.
Do members know what makes this worse? A year ago, when that 2021 budget was tabled, there were already warning signs. The economy was starting to recover and our Parliamentary Budget Officer had warned the government that inflationary pressures were building and that this extra 100 billion dollars' worth of stimulus that the finance minister had set aside to stimulate the economy might not be necessary. In fact, it might might be overkill.
We know now that the government has spent somewhere in the order of $176 billion of spending that is not COVID-related. In other words, it was in the nature of stimulus, which it pumped into the economy, and then Canadians are surprised, and the Liberals are surprised, that we suddenly have rampant inflation.
Today we know that the inflation rate is 6.7% and continues to go up. In fact, economists are incredibly worried right now about the rate of inflation in this country. They are concerned because now the Bank of Canada, our central bank, has had to step up. It is starting to increase interest rates, which, of course, impacts mortgage holders across Canada and loan holders across Canada. Typically, those are businesses and small businesses, and typically those are households that are highly indebted and are very vulnerable to high rate increases. That is what we are seeing happening around us right now.
We have the twin scourges of inflation on one side and increasing interest rates on the other, which are going to severely pinch Canadians and are going to make life even more difficult at a time when we have an affordability crisis in the country.
It is in that context that the government is still proposing to spend, spend, spend. How do I know that? Bill C-8 actually comes out of the previous year's budget. One would have assumed that the government would have learned from its mistakes, and that its next budget, budget 2022, would taper off spending, would control and discipline spending.
In fact, what happened in the 2022 budget? It is just as bad. There is $56 billion of new spending, much of it permanent spending that will bind future generations to these programs the government is creating.
The bottom line is this: These Liberals have been pounding their desks saying, “Hey, we have to get this passed, quickly, quickly, quickly”, and we have resisted. We said that we were going to take our time to review this legislation because there are things in this legislation that we support, such as tax credits for teachers and for farmers. We support those things. From time to time, we have asked the government to pull those things out of this legislation so that we can vote on them separately. Of course, the government says no. They want us to vote against the whole of Bill C-8, so they can blame us for voting against things that we actually support.
We are not going to be bullied. We are not going to be pushed. We are going to take our time and do this job properly.
We have no choice but to vote no against Bill C-8 because it is perpetrating an incredible expense and massive debt on future generations of Canadians, and I just do not want to allow that to happen.
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- Apr/8/22 10:01:57 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to continue debate.
Yesterday when I started my debate, I quoted the words of King Solomon out of the Proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” That admonition is actually etched on Canada's Peace Tower, and there is a reason it is etched there. It is a reminder to governments and a reminder to leaders, including the Prime Minister, that those of us in this august chamber are called upon not only to lead by example, but to lead with vision and have a long-term view of the best interests of our country.
I mentioned yesterday that I believe this budget reflected an unserious Prime Minister, an an unserious Minister of Finance and, quite frankly, an unserious government. I know that a few of my Liberal colleagues did not like my reference to “unserious”, but the reality is that it is a fair characterization of what has happened in this budget. Quite frankly, a serious Prime Minister would not say that budgets balance themselves. A serious Prime Minister would not say that he does not think about monetary policy, which is so critical today as we discuss inflation. A serious Prime Minister would not take a budget, cut the number of pages down by half, from 700 last year down to 300 this year, and then not cut anything else.
Why is it that the government somehow has made the assumption that bigger and bigger government is better? It is not. We as Conservatives believe that as much as possible, government should remain small. It should be as least intrusive in the lives of Canadians as possible. By the way, so should the tax burden, and I will get to that in a second.
I want to touch on four main things. I want to first talk about whether this is a growth budget. I want to talk about inflation and the cost of living, which of course is the biggest thing facing Canadians right now. I want to talk about spending, and this is a big-spending budget. It has not only big spending, but big permanent spending, which is going to saddle future generations of Canadians with a massive debt challenge. Then I want to talk about taxes and tax increases. The Liberal government always talks about having Canadians' backs and having taxpayers' backs. The problem is that it is all rhetoric. It is actually empty, vacuous rhetoric, because with every budget that it tables, the tax burden on Canadians increases and increases. I will get to that in a moment.
Let me start by talking about growth. One of the biggest challenges facing Canada today is that we have an economy that is not positioned for long-term success. Economist after economist and thought leader after thought leader has said that Canada's competitiveness is leaving us way behind in the global marketplace, and I will talk in a moment about what that means. The problem is that the government loves to put out documents like this budget, and smack dab in the title of that budget is the word “growth”. The Liberals want Canadians to believe that they have now heavily invested in driving growth in Canada, but the reality is that they have not.
Why is fundamental growth so important? Why are the structural deficiencies in our economy so pernicious when it comes to our long-term prosperity as a country? It is because we are undermining our ability to compete on the global stage. That is the problem.
If we can learn to produce more per person and more units per person, we drive prosperity. What we do is mitigate the inflationary pressures we face today in our economy. A lot of my Liberal friends do not understand that, but if we become more productive as an economy, as a nation, we reduce the likelihood of runaway inflation. We reduce the likelihood that the Bank of Canada, our central bank, has to step in and start increasing interest rates the way it is doing now.
This is a budget that will only fuel inflation because it is all about spend, spend, spend. There is virtually nothing about growth. When we talk about the few elements in this budget that touch on growth, they are actually about giving subsidies to the private sector. I do not know why the NDP is not screaming bloody murder. They hate subsidies to the private sector, yet there is a $15-billion fund in this budget that effectively amounts to using taxpayers' dollars to incent private companies to invest in themselves and invest in clean technology.
There is nothing in this budget that addresses the issue of interprovincial trade barriers, which is one of the most significant underminers of economic performance in our country. In many ways, we have freer trade with our free trade partners around the world than we have with our 10 provinces and three territories. It is really a sad comment on our country that our federal relationship cannot overcome barriers that prevent us from freely trading among ourselves.
There is nothing in this budget to address comprehensive tax reform. We as Conservatives have been calling for comprehensive tax reform. Even the finance committee, in one of its earlier reports and studies, called specifically for comprehensive tax reform. Why? We want to make sure that our tax system is fair, that those who really cannot afford to pay taxes do not, that those who should not be paying a high tax rate do not and that those who should be paying their fair share of taxes do.
There are four areas of tax performance, which I will get to in a moment, but if we can get tax reform right, we can be assured that Canada will again become a place where the world wants to invest. Members will not believe this, but right now Canada's investment performance as a country is the very worst out of the 30 OECD countries. Many of them are in the EU. They of course include Japan, the United States and Canada. We are at the bottom of the list of those 30 countries when it comes to being able to attract investment from around the world, foreign direct investment, as it is called, or FDI. That is a terrible performance. The government has had seven years to fix that problem and it has done nothing about it other than throw a bit of money at it.
There is also nothing in this budget about rural broadband. One of the best things we can do as a country is invest in the infrastructure that will bring rural broadband to every single Canadian, especially rural Canadians, many of whom still do not have broadband. When we give Canadians access to broadband, we link them to the rest of the world. We link them to the rest of their country. We link them to the rest of their community. When we do that, we improve productivity and our ability to compete and produce in this country. Whether it is products or services, we can do things more efficiently if we have comprehensive broadband infrastructure across our country. There is virtually nothing in this budget on that, except to signal that the Liberals did a bit in the last couple of years, so that should be good enough. When we are talking about competitiveness within the global stage, that is not enough.
There is nothing in this budget about trade-related or climate-related resiliency. In fact, I noted yesterday that there is one glaring hole in this budget. There are a number of us on this side of the House, some of whom are in the House right now listening to me speak, whose communities were devastated by the atmospheric river event that took place in B.C. last year in November, with the massive amount of rain that fell and the flooding that ensued.
In my community of Abbotsford, the whole Sumas Prairie was flooded, a prairie that is full of chicken farmers, egg farmers, dairy farmers, blueberry growers, vegetable growers and greenhouses. It goes on and on. In fact, Abbotsford is the agriculture capital of British Columbia. It is the breadbasket of the province, and for much of the country, by the way. It is the number one farm gate producer in the country per hectare, so everyone can understand, when one of our big prairies is under water by four, five or six feet, the devastation that was wreaked.
We sent a letter to the minister, co-signed by a number of my MP colleagues on the Conservative side, and begged her to please take this seriously. This was a once-in-100-year event that is probably going to become a much more regular event because of climate change-related weather patterns. This is going to happen again. It could happen this coming year or it could happen three years from now, but it is going to happen again.
Did the minister listen to us? Did she reach out to us and ask what it was all about, what specifically we would like her to do and what projects we think she should fund? She did not even reach out. Surely, we as a country can do better when one of the most significant climate-related events does not even get a mention in this budget, is not worthy of a mention, to protect human life, to protect livestock and to protect livelihoods. Clearly the minister does not care.
I have mentioned all of the different areas of this budget that could have addressed growth but did not. We want a deeply rooted economic recovery, not the shallow recovery we are experiencing right now, nor an inflation-driven recovery where Canadians actually get further and further behind. If we are going to have a true, thoroughly rooted recovery within an economically competitive economy, that needs to be driven by the private sector, by small and medium-sized businesses and, yes, by the many large businesses across Canada. This should not be bigger and bigger government trying to steer the economy in the right direction and always getting it wrong.
Next I would like to talk about inflation and the cost of living. Members may recall that in the last budget, from one year ago, the minister stood up in the House and said that in addition to all of the other massive spending she was undertaking in the budget, which, by the way, was the biggest spending budget in Canadian history, much of which has gone to waste, she was also setting aside over 100 billion dollars' worth of investment that she was going to call stimulus. She wanted to plug that stimulus into the economy, inject it into the economy, because the economy was not doing that well. She was priming the pump, so to speak, and we could see where this was going.
Then the Minister of Finance cautioned us. She said she was going to take care not to pump too much stimulus into the economy. We all know, in the House, that if we pump too much stimulus, too much cash, into the economy, it is more cash chasing the same number of goods and services. That creates inflation. She said that she was going to take care of that and make sure that consumers and Canadians were protected. She said she was going to put in place labour-based guardrails, and a number of other guardrails, that would give her an idea of whether this stimulus was actually required so she would not make the mistake of pumping too much in and driving inflation. At that time, a year ago, inflation was not at the level it is today.
Now, we fast-forward to today. Yesterday, I was in the budget lock-up, where we got to ask questions of the government officials. We wanted to know what happened to the stimulus. We wanted to know how much of the stimulus was actually spent, whether the guardrails were applied and how much of that stimulus was left unspent.
There was no answer. Officials stumbled, fumbled and said they could not really identify how much of that stimulus was spent, because it had been allocated to different departments and they were responsible for reporting on their own spending. They said they could not really tell us that.
What did they say about the guardrails? What did they say about these protective measures that would ensure not too much cash was pumped into our economy to stimulate inflation? They said they did not know. There was no answer.
Today, I think we know what the answer is. Every single penny of that hundred-plus billion dollars was pumped straight into the economy, and guess what we have today? We have the worst inflation in over 30 years, which was driven by the actions of the Liberal government.
I will be the first to acknowledge that not all inflation is driven just by what we do in Canada. Yes, there are supply chain constraints around the world. Yes, there are spikes in commodity prices around the world that drive up the cost of living. That is consumer price inflation. However, there is something else called “asset price inflation” that covers things like houses, and that is a Canada-made inflation problem.
That inflation, of course, has left millions of Canadians behind. It has left behind Canadians who want to get into the housing market and Canadians who can no longer afford to buy groceries for their kids. They are cutting back. It has left behind Canadians who cannot buy household goods.
We are now in an affordability crisis in this country, and the government has to bear some of that blame. This budget simply makes it worse. It exacerbates the inflationary pressures we have in our country. This is a big-spending budget. What it does is spend, spend, spend. There is more cash being pumped into the economy, which is driving inflation.
Canadians should not, in any way, expect inflation to go down in the medium term, or even in the short term. In fact, the Bank of Canada governor was before the Standing Committee on Finance not too long ago. He said we should expect that things are going to get worse before they get better. Is that on the Liberal government? Of course it is. The Liberals are the ones responsible for government spending, and this budget represents a massive government expenditure.
I got into the spending part of it. There is $56 billion in new spending in this budget. That is massive. What is worse is that most of this $56 billion of new spending is new, permanent spending.
I want to remind members of something. Back in January 2021, just over a year ago, the finance minister received a mandate letter from the Prime Minister. For those who do not know what a mandate letter is, it is simply a long set of instructions the Prime Minister gives either to new ministers or other ministers whose directions he wants to refresh.
He gave her this mandate letter and right there, in the middle of that letter, it said, “Minister, you will not embark on any new permanent spending.”
Period, full stop: There would be “no new permanent spending.”
That was her instruction just over a year ago, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, when the Liberals were spending wildly, and perhaps there were some justifiable reasons for spending a little bit more than we normally would in the budget.
Here we are, in March. Just four months ago, at the end of 2021, for some reason the Prime Minister decided to give the finance minister a new mandate letter. This was some 11 months after the first. We looked at it. We looked at it carefully. I am looking for it, and there is no reference to new permanent spending. The Liberals had purged the document of that directive.
Anyone who thinks that the Liberal government is committed to living within its means can forget it, as my colleague just said. This is not a serious government, as I said earlier, and we cannot take seriously any of the commitments that it makes, because tomorrow the Liberals will change their minds and say, “Too bad. Tough luck. Be happy.”
There is a ton of spending in this budget. Of course, there is the NPD spending on dental care. We see that there is more spending on the failed Canada Infrastructure Bank. In fact, the Liberals have expanded the mandate of the failed Canada Infrastructure Bank, which is finding itself incapable of getting money out of the door and actually making the investments in infrastructure that are required in our country. There is more spending and more wasteful spending, and who pays for it? Taxpayers and consumers do, because the spending drives inflation, which leaves Canadians behind. The taxpayers also have to pay the bill for this spending.
Of course, I have not even mentioned the fact that this is actually an NDP-Liberal government. This is an unholy alliance, and guess who the tail is that is wagging the dog? It is the NDP. The NDP is telling the Liberal government how many taxpayers' dollars it should be spending, and it goes on and on. Many of the asks that the NDP had, when it shacked up with the Liberals in their common-law relationship, have not been reflected in the budget. They are coming in the next and the following budget. They are coming. I can tell members that.
There are also promises that this government made in the last election that did not show up in the budget.
There is more spending to come. With regard to the suggestion from the finance minister that, somehow, she was going to rein in spending and discipline spending, and this was all in safe hands, the Liberals' record says otherwise.
In fact, did we know that, since the Liberals came into power, they have increased government spending by 53% in just over six years? Much of that is permanent spending, so future generations of Canadians are stuck with this, and this is spending that is generating inflation in our economy.
Did members know that, even since the pandemic crisis in 2019, government spending has gone up 25%? The minister stands in the House and claims that she is disciplining government spending and that she is reining it in. “Trust me,” is what she said.
I also talked about taxes. This budget is full of tax increases, and the Liberals have made them very discreetly. We have to explore the different corners of this budget to find these tax increases.
Of course, there are increases on alcohol taxes because there is an escalator built into the excise taxes on alcohol. What this government did, back in 2017, was something really clever. The Liberals said they did not want to keep going back to the representatives of the people to ask them for permission to spend taxpayers' money. What they were going to do was build into their structure an escalator that automatically kicked in and increased taxes on Canadians every single year. They did that with the excise tax.
Let me talk about GST. We have inflation in Canada, so the GST revenues to the government have skyrocketed because of the oil and gas revenues that have come in. The price of gasoline at the pump has gone way up, which has left Canadians behind. They are unable to fill up their gas tanks, unable to get their kids to school, unable to get to work and unable to drive their kids to hockey practice or music lessons.
On top of the high price of gasoline, the government layers the GST. The more that inflation sets in, the more GST revenue the government collects, which is why it had these windfall revenues this past year. The windfall revenues were not from good management on its part. It was not an underlying, strong economic performance.
This was about the government benefiting from inflation, and the Prime Minister benefiting from inflation through higher GST revenues and through higher excise tax revenues, but leaving Canadians behind because they have to pay the price for that. That is completely unacceptable. We, as Canadians, are better than that.
There is something in this budget about housing. The minister made a big thing about housing. I asked her a question yesterday after she gave her budget speech. I mentioned that housing was the number one concern facing Canadian families, especially those who are not in homes. They cannot get into homes anymore because inflation and housing affordability have left them behind.
In fact, in Canada, the price of housing has more than doubled since the Liberal government came into power. We did not see that kind of housing inflation under Stephen Harper, did we? There were steady increases, but they were controlled. Prices were stable. Today, prices are no longer stable and families have been left behind.
When I asked the finance minister a question yesterday, she could not respond. All she said was that I was right, and that housing was the number one problem in this country right now, especially for Canadian families. She made a statement and made the suggestion that she was going to double the number of houses she was going to build in Canada over the next 10 years. Do members remember that? She stood up and said, “I promise the House, and I promise Canadians, that over the next 10 years, I am going to double the number of homes”. She used the word “we”. I am assuming it was the royal “we”, and she was referring to the government.
I said to the minister, if she was going to double the number of houses, she must know how many houses she and her government had built over the past seven years since the Liberals were elected. She must know that figure because without knowing that figure, it would irresponsible to make the statement that the Liberals were going to double the number of homes they would build. I said I just needed a number on how many homes they had built in the seven years they had been in government.
The minister hummed and hawed, and spent about two and a half minutes pontificating and arguing around the question. She never answered the question, even though some of my colleagues were calling out, “What is the number? How many homes did you build in the last seven years?” She could not give an answer, yet she made the statement that she was going to double the number of houses over the next 10 years. It is a number that she does not even know. That is the kind of economic, financial and fiscal leadership we have with the NDP-Liberal government.
There is one way we can address the skyrocketing cost of housing in this country. In fact, there is a way we can address the issue of skyrocketing inflation, broadly speaking, whether it is on gas, household goods or anything else we buy, and on the services we buy in our communities. They have all gone up because of inflation. There is a way of controlling inflation, especially in the housing market. Do members know what that is? It is to control government spending. Thanks for asking. We need to control government spending.
Instead, the current government has done the very opposite. It is fanning the flames of inflation. In fact, it has poured gasoline on the flames of inflation and things are only going to get worse in the Canadian short term.
Before I finish, and I do have a motion to bring, I want to mention that, like any budget that is full of bad policies and massive Liberal spending, there are always a few things that we can support. For example, the announcement of enhanced defence spending is something we would support, but the reality is that the current government has allowed defence spending to lag behind. Now it is catching up, but we see this as simply a $6-billion down payment to strengthen our ability to defend ourselves as a country and to engage in the global community of nations when it is required.
We can support a $3.8-billion critical minerals strategy as well, because critical minerals are critically important to the electric vehicle industry, which we are trying to get a foothold in. I would love to see Canada become a leader in that.
There is a ban on foreign homebuyers for two years. I think we can support that.
Of course, for small businesses there is a small improvement when it comes to the small business tax rate. Small businesses across the country will be pleased that at least the government has finally, after years of pleading, agreed to adjust the phase-out schedule for the small business tax rate.
This is a budget that is profoundly lacking in vision. I mentioned that at the beginning of my speech. Canadians can do better. We have so much wealth in our country with the natural resources, the human capital and the education we have. We can do so much better than having to always borrow tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars every time a government tables a budget. We should not have to be doing this. As we do this, in the process we kick more money into the economy and drive up inflation, leaving millions of Canadians behind. We can do better.
I move, seconded by the member for Simcoe North:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:
“the House not approve the budgetary policy of the government since it fails to:
a. rein in spending in order to control inflation;
b. provide Canadians with tax relief; and
c. take immediate action to increase housing supply.”
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- Apr/4/22 6:16:03 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I think it is time we shifted from opinion back to fact.
As a member of the finance committee, I was part of the pre-budget consultations, although not the whole process, because I was appointed critic about halfway through. However, the member for Kingston and the Islands is not a member of that committee, so much of what he was saying was actually speculation. It is unfortunate, because this chamber should be a chamber in which we discuss facts, evidence and science, and that is what I would like to do. I want to talk about facts.
When the finance committee resolved to embark on a pre-budget consultation process for the 2022 budget, it established a timeline that was completely unreasonable. It ran out of time because, as members may remember, back in 2021 the Prime Minister was so desperate to get a majority government that he called an unnecessary and expensive election, which of course set the work of this House behind by many months. When that election did not deliver the majority that the Prime Minister expected, he then delayed bringing back the House of Commons, so the time that was left to do pre-budget consultations was compressed. The way the Liberals and the NDP, the new NDP-Liberal government, dealt with it was by effectively having hundreds and hundreds of submissions made to the committee. In fact, there were 500 submissions that came in to the committee, and then it adopted 222 recommendations that had come from those submissions.
Now, members have to understand the process. When families across Canada are establishing their own budgets, they first determine how much income they have as a family or how much revenue comes into their family, and then they determine how much they can spend on rent and mortgage payments; how much they can spend on food; and how much they can spend on gas, transportation, vacations for the kids, hockey and music lessons. They determine those expenditures within the context of the revenue that is coming into the household. None of that happened here at committee.
Hundreds of Canadians were coming to committee, and many were simply saying, “Hey, I want you to spend money on this, and that, and that.” Then our NDP friends, our Bloc friends and especially our Liberal friends uncritically accepted these recommendations and incorporated them into the report that is before us today. This report has 222 recommendations, and many of them have big dollars attached to them. In fact, when we added all the dollars up of the recommendations that had dollars attached, it was around the $50-billion mark. Half of the recommendations had no dollars attached, but clearly, had they been costed, they would have resulted in many billions of dollars more in asks. They all found their way into this report, and that is the report we are debating here in the House today.
My colleague for Kingston and the Islands was upset that we insisted on debating tens of billions of dollars of recommendations. These are expenditures that the government is being asked to make and that the House is supposed to recommend to the government when we are facing a massive debt crisis in this country with no debt management plan, deficits as far as the eye can see, and no date on which the budget will be balanced, unlike households across Canada who have to balance their books if they are going to survive. This government has decided, over the last seven years, that it does not care about balanced budgets. In fact, the Parliamentary Budget Officer said that based on the current trajectory of the government, this country will not balance its books until the year 2070.
Fifty years from now, we may begin to live within our means. We may begin to live within the revenues that government takes in through taxes. That is no way to manage the finances of this country.
Therefore, we have this process of all these asks coming in to the committee. One would expect that, like most households, they would go through a prioritization process of what are the “must haves”, what are the “like to haves” and what are the recommendations that really are not necessary at this time. Families across this country go through that process.
Do members think this committee went through that process? Did it triage the various requests that came in and establish a set of priorities? Did it look through the revenues the government takes in, the hundreds of billions of dollars that are required to fund those recommendations, and then place them into that context and decide what is best for Canada? Did it then walk through the recommendations and prioritize them, saying at one point in time that some of the recommendations are just not affordable right now? Did the committee go through that process? It absolutely did not.
The process that took place at the finance committee was an absolute farce. In response to the question from the member for Kingston and the Islands, which was why we did not bring forward our own recommendations, it was because the process was a farce. It was not a budgetary review process. It was not a pre-budget consultation process, where we weigh the different requests and then come forward to the government with a set of recommendations that all of us could agree on. The NDP-Liberal government and its Bloc allies came along and said they would uncritically take all of the recommendations and present them to government as recommendations for the next budget, which we will hear about on Thursday of this week. That is farcical.
I think you understand that, Madam Speaker. That is not the way the financial affairs of this country should be run because we are facing a massive debt that future generations are going to have to pay. It is irresponsible to take every recommendation that comes into committee and then say to government that they want it to implement those recommendations. That is grossly irresponsible.
I have grandchildren. The 13th is on its way. I do not want to saddle them with a debt that they cannot manage to pay. Today, we know that interest rates are on their way up, so we have the problem of inflation and rising interest rates. Those are the twin scourges that are going to really impact future generations of Canadians. How are they supposed to pay for all of this? I lament for the future of our children, grandchildren and the many generations to come. Right now, they are not going to have a balanced budget. We will be running deficits for the next 50 years, based on what the Parliamentary Budget Officer has suggested.
By the way, that does not take into account all of the promises the Liberal government had to make to its NDP partners. There is pharmacare to be added on. There is dental care to be added on. There is defence spending. By the way, we as Conservatives strongly support beefing up our defence and our Armed Forces, as a country. They have to take all of that into account. They have to prioritize. We as Conservatives would prioritize defence spending, but for the rest of it there was no prioritization that took place. It was grossly irresponsible. I do not want to leave that kind of a country to my children.
We have the right to expect better from parliamentarians. We have a right to expect better from the Prime Minister and the finance minister. I know the Prime Minister has said that he does not pay attention to monetary policy. That shows in his performance and the poor performance of our economy, where we are now seeing massive inflation setting in. The inflationary pressures facing our country are immense, and they are going to get worse before they get better.
At least, that is what the Governor of the Bank of Canada recently said. Things are going to get worse before they are going to get better when it comes to inflation.
Why do we have inflation? Yes, we have supply chain constraints. Yes, we have problems with skyrocketing commodity prices, but one of the reasons we have this problem in Canada, especially in the housing market, where houses have been basically priced out of reach for millions of Canadians, is excess liquidity. In other words, the government has borrowed and spent so much money over the past two years that it has flooded the market with dollars that are chasing a limited number of goods, including a limited number of houses across Canada. That is when inflation sets in.
This is the environment that faces coming generations. I do not want my children and grandchildren to have this hanging around their necks, yet the government has had no plan to manage that massive debt load. There is no plan to ever return to balance. There is no plan. We have asked, month after month and day after day, in the House in question period, where the finance minister's plan was to fight inflation. How is she going to address the skyrocketing cost of living, or the cost of groceries, with families going hungry, or the cost of gasoline? Parents want to drop off their kids at school or take them to hockey or music lessons, and they are realizing that a tank of gas costs double what it did just a year ago. That is not the kind of world we want to live in. That is not the kind of world we want to leave to our children.
Again, I know this is a sobering thought on the debate we are having today. There are 222 recommendations to spend without a critical eye being placed on each one of those recommendations. There is no critical eye on how future generations are going to pay for all of this. We, as a country, can do better. The government should do better, and some day a Conservative government will do better.
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- Mar/31/22 10:16:26 a.m.
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moved:
That, given that,
(i) excessive government spending has increased the deficit, the national debt, and fuelled inflation to its highest level in 31 years,
(ii) taxes on Canadians continue to increase, from the carbon tax to escalator taxes to Canada Pension Plan premiums,
(iii) the government refuses to provide relief to Canadians by temporarily reducing the Goods and Services Tax on gasoline and diesel,
the House call on the government to present a federal budget rooted in fiscal responsibility, with no new taxes, a path to balance, and a meaningful fiscal anchor.
He said: Mr. Speaker, I want to let you know that I am splitting my time with the member for Mégantic—L'Érable.
Excessive government spending; deficits as far as the eye can see; the largest national debt this country has ever seen, in fact doubled in a short six years; inflation running rampant; skyrocketing housing prices; seven years littered with broken promises: that is the record of the failed Liberal government.
The motion before us today is hoping to right the ship somewhat. As members know, next week on April 7, the Minister of Finance is going to be tabling in the House a budget that is intended to chart the pathway forward for this country when it comes to our finances and how we spend taxpayers' money. Given the fact that the last six years of the Liberal government has been such an unmitigated financial disaster, we would like to make some suggestions for what it could do to actually restore some sanity and probity into our fiscal situation here in our country.
Let me begin by talking about what Canadians have come to expect. Over the last two and a half years we have been fighting the COVID pandemic. Rightfully Canadians have been concerned about their health and the health of their neighbours, so we were asked to be vaccinated. Remember that? We were told if we were vaccinated we would not pick up the COVID virus. Of course, now we find out that is not true. I am triple vaccinated and I have not had the COVID virus. My wife is triple vaccinated. After she was triple vaccinated, she got the COVID virus and we live together, so the health authorities had that wrong.
I support vaccination, but the Liberals told us if Canadians got vaccinated we will have life return to normal. Lockdowns will be gone, mandates will be lifted and life will be back to normal. What happened? It was quite the opposite. We are still under lockdowns. We are still under vaccine mandates at the federal level, which is the Prime Minister's responsibility. Now we are faced with an even greater challenge and that is inflation. Today, our inflation rate is somewhere in the order of 5.7%.
House prices are up a whopping 30% in just this year alone, so how does the government expect young Canadian families who have this dream of home ownership to ever fulfill that dream? Millions of Canadians have lost that dream of home ownership.
We have seen gas prices at the pump go up 32% since February of this past year, 2021. Of course, those gas prices continue to climb in my region of Abbotsford and the greater Vancouver area. Some gas stations were charging $2.09 per litre of gas and right now there is no prospect of that going down at all. In fact, the prospect is that those prices will keep going up.
In order to address that issue, we as Conservatives, presented solutions. One of those solutions was tabled in the House a week ago, which was to, temporarily at least, lift the GST on gasoline purchases. Give Canadians a break. We had a debate in the House and guess what. Our NDP-Liberal friends voted against relief at the gas pumps. We brought forward another proposal, which was, why do we not lift the carbon tax? Let us get rid of the carbon tax and give motorists a break. We know the NDP-Liberal coalition is opposed to that. In fact, it is the government of high taxes.
Inflation is being driven by a number of factors. I have already mentioned taxes. Every time the current government raises taxes, whether it is carbon taxes or the rising GST revenues that it gets because of the rising gas prices, every time it imposes an escalator tax like it did for alcohol and every time it raises CPP premiums, that is a burden on Canadians and it is driving inflationary pressures in Canada.
However, it gets worse. Less than a year ago, the Minister of Finance was given a mandate letter from the Prime Minister in which she was instructed to engage in no more new permanent spending. Do members remember that? It was a directive to the finance minister for no new permanent spending. Guess what happened. Today, we are looking at pharmacare. That is new permanent spending. We are looking at dental care. That is new permanent spending. We are looking at transit. We are looking at numerous new spending programs, including child care for example. It goes on and on with broken promises.
By the way, in the most recent mandate letter, less than a year after the original one that prohibited new permanent spending, suddenly the mandate letter had no reference at all to new permanent spending. It is a government that loves to virtue signal on finances, on deficits, on debt and on spending, but it never delivers.
It gets worse. April 1, tomorrow, is April Fool's Day, and of course the Liberals are going to treat Canadians like fools. What are the Liberals going to do? They are going to increase the carbon tax by another $10 per tonne. Do members know what that means? For those provinces that have the carbon tax backstop it means another 11¢ at the pump. That is on the current Liberal government. They cannot blame that on anyone else.
It gets worse. Do people remember the last budget, a year ago, when the Minister of Finance talked about the stimulus that she was going to pump into the economy to get the economy going? The economy was already starting to grow and bounce back, but she insisted that she needed over $100 billion of additional money to pump into the economy. Guess what happened. There was so much money pumped into the economy that it has caused inflation, especially in the housing market. As I already mentioned, in one year alone, there was a 30% increase in housing prices. How are Canadians supposed to cope with that? How are Canadians supposed to cope?
We are facing an inflation crisis. We are facing a tax crisis crisis in this country. We are facing a spending crisis in this country. That is why today we are calling upon this finance minister, this Prime Minister and the NDP-Liberal government to do the right thing, which is to rein in spending. In this coming budget next week, we are calling on the government to make sure that there is a clear pathway toward balanced budgets, where we return to living within our means. That is what responsible governments do. We have not seen that for the last six years.
We are solution-oriented. We are asking the government to come up with a defensible, firm fiscal anchor that has a clear pathway to a balanced budget in the medium term. In the motion before them, members see that we are asking the government to address inflationary pressures, to address taxation that is going through the roof and to address the needs of Canadians.
Canadians are really struggling. They have lost their dream of home ownership. They cannot pay for gas for their cars to take their kids to hockey lessons, to school and to music lessons. They cannot afford life anymore. They cannot buy groceries. My goodness, we are living in one of the richest countries in the world and the current government has made it virtually impossible for many families to even afford groceries.
I am asking the government to do the right thing in its upcoming budget. I am asking it to find a pathway to balance, restrain spending and control the urge to spend. I know Liberal tax-and-spend is the way of this country whenever we have a Liberal government. However, I ask the Liberals to listen to us. We are solution-oriented.
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- Mar/28/22 2:32:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my question is for the new NDP–Liberal Prime Minister. During the last election, the NDP promised to spend a whopping $214 billion of taxpayer money with no plan to balance the budget. Now, the NDP and Liberals have negotiated a backroom deal to go on a massive spending spree that would cheat future generations out of their prosperity.
How many billions has the Prime Minister bargained away to hang on to power, and how many of the NDP's spending demands will we see in the upcoming budget?
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- Mar/22/22 2:34:16 p.m.
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Mr Speaker, my question is to the new NDP-Liberal coalition. In its last election platform, the NDP promised over $214 billion of spending with no plan to ever balance the budget. Now, the NDP and the Liberals have secretly negotiated a deal to circumvent our democracy and go on a massive spending spree that future generations are going to have to pay back.
How many billions has the Prime Minister bargained away in order to hang on to power, and how many of the NDP's spending promises will we see in the coalition's upcoming budget?
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- Nov/24/21 9:04:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate my colleague from British Columbia on his fine speech.
I want to address the issue of the cost: Billions of dollars of infrastructure will be required to address the very real flooding dangers in the area where we both live and represent our constituents. Billions of dollars' worth of diking upgrades and new dikes will have to be built.
I would ask the member to take this question directly to the Minister of Emergency Preparedness, to the finance minister, to the infrastructure minister and to the Prime Minister himself: Are they prepared to commit, in the next budget, to include a very significant envelope to address specifically the issue of dike protection, not only in British Columbia but across the country, yes or no?
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