- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Abbotsford
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $146,571.88
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, I want to ask the member a question relating to promises made by the finance minister.
Last year, in the budget debate, she made it very clear that her government had a plan to return to balanced budgets. In the more recent fall economic statement, the minister again said that she had a plan to return to balanced budgets, or, in other words, the government living within its means.
The most recent budget has no commitment anymore to returning to balanced budgets, so I would ask my good friend and colleague across the aisle this. Why is it that the government has now abandoned any commitment to returning to balanced budgets?
113 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Madam Speaker, I am going to ask the minister a question that I have asked her before. It is one that we have not received an answer to. It is a question that I believe Canadians deserve an answer to. It has to do with the state of Canada's finances.
We have incurred the largest budget deficits in Canadian history. We have the largest debt that Canada has ever seen. In fact, our debt has doubled over the last six years. We have accumulated more debt over the last six years than all previous governments in Canadian history.
Canadians, quite rightly, want to know when the government's house will be brought back into order, so my question for her is a simple one, with a yes-or-no answer. Does she have any plan to return to balanced budgets?
141 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/2/22 10:26:00 p.m.
- Watch
- 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.
1241 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Apr/8/22 10:42:34 a.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, that is a fair question. What would we cut? That is a question that should be asked. I will start. For one thing, we would cut the failed Canada Infrastructure Bank. With $35 billion, this is an institution that has not delivered the infrastructure that it was supposed to deliver.
However, I do want to do a shout-out to all of those workers the member referred to. Yes, many of these people, the teachers and the health care workers who have been on the front lines, are the heroes within our economy. They went to work knowing full well the risks involved and they served us so well. The member mentioned the long-term care workers. That is a problem. Long-term care for seniors in this country is a real vulnerability. In a couple of years, 25% of Canadians will be seniors and over the age of 65. Imagine. Who is going to be taking care of them? Will they age at home? Will they be in institutions? Who is going to be caring for them is something we have to get our minds around. I do thank the member for asking that question.
In terms of cutting, I will say one last thing. It is very clear that the budget does not reflect a triaging of issues, in other words, a prioritization of the issues that matter most to Canadians. Had the government gone through a proper prioritization process and actually implemented and spent on the things that Canadians really need and care about, this budget would have looked quite different and would actually be much more responsible. Canadians want government to live within its means because Canadians live within their means. They have balanced budgets. Without balanced budgets, they go broke. They know that, unfortunately the government does not.
305 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Apr/8/22 10:01:57 a.m.
- Watch
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.”
4402 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Apr/5/22 2:31:08 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, Canadians are trying to balance their budgets, they are trying to feed their families and they are trying to put a roof over their heads, yet at every step the Prime Minister has abandoned them as the skyrocketing cost of living leaves millions of Canadians behind. This is a Prime Minister who promised to help the middle class and those wanting to join it, yet under this left-leaning NDP-Liberal government, that dream is now dead for millions of Canadians.
Will the upcoming budget finally include help for Canadians who are no longer part of the middle class?
101 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Apr/4/22 6:16:03 p.m.
- Watch
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.
1695 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Apr/4/22 2:32:00 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, my question is to the minister.
Money does not grow on trees. Virtue-signalling does not feed people or put gas in their car, and it does not buy a home. What Canada needs is a plan for growth with investments in jobs and productivity. We need a budget that has a real debt-management strategy with a firm fiscal anchor and a clear path to returning to balanced budgets.
Will the upcoming spend-DP-Liberal budget include a plan to control inflation, a strategy to grow our economy and a return to balanced budgets?
97 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Apr/4/22 2:30:43 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, while Canadians are facing sky-high inflation, which has led to higher grocery and gas prices, and a housing affordability crisis, they want real solutions from this government. They want a plan to fight the skyrocketing cost of living that has left so many behind. Another budget with an avalanche of spending will only fuel inflation, leaving future generations with more deficits and more debt to repay.
I ask the minister this: Will the government's upcoming budget present a plan to fight inflation, grow our economy and return to balanced budgets?
94 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Mar/28/22 2:34:09 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, to the new NDP–Liberal finance minister, inflation is raging and Canadians have been left behind. The cost of everything is skyrocketing: gas, groceries and household goods. Millions of families have seen the dream of home ownership slip through their fingers. Canadians are struggling to balance their budgets, yet the minister refuses to balance her own.
When will she finally tell us what she plans to do about the affordability crisis? When will she finally stop borrowing and spending and get inflation under control?
87 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Mar/21/22 3:30:16 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, generally I work hard and the Conservative members of this committee work hard to secure consensus reports, but in this case that was impossible for a number of reasons. First, this report involves recommendations for tens of billions of dollars of spending for which no prioritization process was applied, none whatsoever. What is worse is that this was not placed within the context of balanced budgets. There was no spending restraint strategy attached to it.
On top of that, this whole report is going to set Canada way back. These recommendations were adopted uncritically by the Liberal, the NDP and the Bloc members of this committee. For that reason, we had to issue a dissenting report, which highlights the importance of being fiscally prudent within a balanced budget.
130 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Mar/21/22 2:30:28 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, ever since this finance minister took charge, the cost of living has skyrocketed. Inflation is at a 30-year high. We know Canadians are struggling to balance their own budgets, and paycheques do not go as far as they used to. The cost of everything is out of control, including gas, groceries and housing, yet the minister does not seem to care. Things are not getting better for Canadians. They are getting worse.
When will the minister tell Canadians how she plans to fight inflation, and when will she table her next budget?
95 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- menumenu
- notificationsnotifications
- home
- mailmail
- searchsearch
