- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Abbotsford
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $146,571.88
- Government Page
- Jun/3/24 5:17:42 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Regina—Lewvan.
I would like to get back to the basics on the bill before us, which is on a national pharmacare program. Before we can even consider a program like this, I believe Canadians need to place all of this into context within the fiscal mess that has been created by the Liberal government going forward.
As members know, we are facing a fiscal wall. We are leaving behind, for future generations to pay back, a massive national debt. In fact, over the last nine years, this Prime Minister and his Liberal government have amassed more indebtedness than all previous Canadian governments combined since Confederation. That is one piece of the context.
What about the ongoing deficits being run by this Liberal government? There is no end to them. In fact, time and time again, the finance minister has been asked to at least give us a timeline when we will return to balance, when Canada will begin again to live within its means and not spend more money than is being brought in by taxes. Each time, the Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister has said nothing. She will not respond to that question, because the answer is that there is no plan. How can we, as a nation, justify billion-dollar program after billion-dollar program without having a plan to bring our fiscal mess back into order? The only way to do that is to come back into balanced budgets, which has not happened.
There is also the challenge of increasing taxes on Canadians. Carbon taxes, which have been the subject of much debate in the House, keep going up and up. Fuel taxes are going up and up. In fact, it was not long ago when my colleague for Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon was at committee, and they were grilling the Minister of Small Business. The minister had asserted that she had reduced taxes on small businesses. The simple question that my colleague asked was which tax the minister had reduced on small business. And the answer was, well, humming and hawing. Finally the minister turned to her officials and said that perhaps her officials could answer that question. The officials looked dumbfounded, because they did not have an answer either. The truth is, taxes have not been reduced on small businesses. Across the board, taxes have been raised on Canadians.
Now, within that context, this Liberal government wants to introduce another billion-dollar spending program. The Liberals could have come to us and said, “Listen, the recent budget shows that we will be returning to balance within the next, say, five years, and within that context we'd like to bring forward a program that is going to help those who have no pharmacare coverage.” However, that is not what they did. This government came forward and said that it was going to spend another $40 billion, $50 billion additional, that it would go into deficit by another $40 billion, and that it would throw in this program that would put Canada in the hole for years to come. However, who has to pay all of that back? I heard some heckling over here in the corner because they do not like to hear the truth, but it will be future generations of Canadians, with interest thereon. So that is the context in which this whole pharmacare discussion needs to take place.
This is not a pharmacare plan. Like so many others, this is an empty promise that will leave Canadians deeply disappointed and angry.
Let us remember it was the current Prime Minister who promised affordable housing back when he was first elected in 2015. Instead, what we have is a doubling of housing prices, rents, down payments, interest rates and mortgage payments, and another broken promise. Oh yes, the carbon tax would not cost Canadians anything and we now know from the PBO that in fact that is not true. The Prime Minister promised taxes would go down. He promised safe streets and instead we have chaos, crime and drugs on our streets and social disorder. With so many broken promises, we could go on and on. We could spend hours talking about broken promises, but the pharmacare plan is destined to be just another one of those broken promises.
Now, there is another problem. By its own definition, the pharmacare plan is intended to be a single-payer plan. That means the Government of Canada pays and it is universal, so, of course, the fear is for the 97% of Canadians who already have some kind of coverage, typically through their union plan or company plan, or they may have bought coverage. They would now lose that coverage because the pharmacare plan that is being proposed by the current Liberal government is a very narrow one. It would cover a very small number of medicines when, in fact, most plans across Canada are expansive. Now, it looks like the government wants to insert itself and introduce a plan that would actually cannibalize many of the other plans across Canada. There has been no consultation with the insurance industry and there has been no consultation with the provinces.
Let us remember that health care is the purview of the provinces and yet we have the government starting to step into dental care and pharmacare. That is on top of all the billions and billions of dollars in health care transfers every single year. Somehow, the provinces have not been consulted adequately. We know that some provinces are already providing additional pharmacare support and some provincial leaders are saying, “Listen, instead, give us the cash because we are already providing these services.” Others are saying, “Listen, we have a long list of priorities for our health care system and that is not the top priority. We have a number of other priorities.” For example, how about that mental health funding that was supposed to come to the provinces? It has never happened. Oh, what about that palliative care funding that the Prime Minister promised to the provinces years ago? What happened to that? It is gone. Therefore, the lack of consultation with the provinces and repeated stepping into areas that are the exclusive jurisdiction of the provinces is, I believe, leading us down this road where, without a fiscal plan that will lead us back to budget balance, we continue to heap more spending onto the taxpayer and that is unsustainable.
This pharmacare program is a big program, like so many other programs that the current government tries to introduce and implement. In fact, it was the member for Kingston and the Islands who said that this program is big and complex. Well, if it is big and complex, there is one guarantee: The current Liberal government will not be able to manage it effectively. We think of all the scandals, the spending scandals, GC Strategies, the ArriveCAN scandal and the TMX pipeline that went seven times over budget after the Liberal government purchased that pipeline.
This is the question that Canadians have to ask themselves: Do we trust the current Liberal government and the Prime Minister to manage a pharmacare program that is billions of dollars in the coming years? Do we trust them to manage this program efficiently and effectively? I believe the answer from Canadians would be a resounding no.
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Mr. Speaker, I quote:
...let me be very clear. We are absolutely determined that our debt-to-GDP ratio must continue to decline and our deficits must continue to be reduced. The pandemic debt we incurred to keep Canadians safe and solvent must [and will] be paid down.... This is our fiscal anchor. This is a line we will not cross.
Who said that? It was our finance minister. A year ago, she made that bold statement, said those bold words, when she proclaimed to the world that Canada's debt-to-GDP ratio would be Canada's anchor and that she would not cross the line of allowing it to increase.
Here we are a year later. Can we guess what happened? Our finance minister took a big step across the line. The issue for Canadians is this: Whom do they trust to manage this country's finances?
We asked for three things. We asked that the war on work and lower taxes for workers be ended, that the inflationary deficits that are driving the sky-high cost of living be ended and that the gatekeepers be removed from home construction across Canada so Canadians can have their dream of home ownership restored. None of those three requests were followed through on by the Liberal government.
I want to touch on a couple of issues, including affordability and inflation, the problem of uncontrolled spending, the staggering cost of government and, finally, economic performance. I do not know if I will have enough time to cover all those issues, but I will do my best.
First is affordability and inflation. Taxes on everything are going up. There is a reason that Canadians should not trust the current government to manage finances. It is a tax-and-spend government under which the cost of living has skyrocketed, including the cost of groceries, gas at the pumps and home heating.
Let us not forget the cost of housing. Under the Liberal government, nine out of 10 Canadians now say that dream of home ownership has disappeared. It is a dream I grew up with. I assumed it was attainable for most, if not all, Canadians. Today, nine out of 10 young Canadians say that dream is no longer a reality for them. A down payment on the average Canadian home, the average mortgage payment and, quite frankly, the average rent payment have doubled in Canada over the last seven years under the Liberal government.
Inflation has eroded what a dollar buys. We see stagnating wages across the country. It is at the point now where the gap between the rich and the poor is growing ever greater. Those with assets are growing richer, whereas those who earn paycheques are growing poorer. We now have one in five Canadians skipping meals just to get by and have enough to eat. Let us think about that. There is a perverse situation in which the poor are going to food banks and asking for medical assistance in dying, or in other words, assisted suicide. This is not because they are sick but because they do not want to go hungry. Is that the perverse situation in which we find ourselves in Canada? The government is expanding access to medical assistance in dying, while at the same time, it is not providing the resources Canadians need to at least survive and have some kind of satisfaction in their lives.
I will talk about the problem of uncontrolled spending, which is a critical issue for this country. Today, the government is spending $151 billion more than it did in 2015, when it came to power and took over from the Harper government. That spending has created unprecedented inflationary pressures that are driving the skyrocketing cost of living for Canadians, who just cannot afford life in Canada anymore. Today, we have a deficit of $43 billion. Does everyone remember when the Prime Minister, back in the 2015 election, promised tiny deficits of no more than $10 billion? Every year since then, budget deficits have been much greater than that.
We all acknowledge that, during COVID, there had to be supports and benefits provided to Canadians to allow them to make it through that very troubling period. However, we are out of COVID now, and the deficits continue despite the government's promises to return to balanced budgets. The Minister of Finance promised we would return to a balanced budget. She promised that last year, just one year ago, and today she broke that promise. Promise after promise after promise is broken by Canada's corrupt and failed government.
The result, of course, is that over the last seven years, Canada's national debt has doubled. In fact, the government has racked up more debt than all other Canadian governments combined. That, by definition, is profligacy. That is irresponsible use of taxpayers' money. The government does not understand that we have to live within our means, the way any Canadian family has to.
I will go on and talk about the staggering cost of government. Under the current government, the federal public service has increased by nearly 31%. In seven years, over 80,000 new federal government positions have been added. I can ask an average Canadian citizen out there whether they are getting better service. Those 80,000 professionals who have been hired by the government must be providing an enhanced level of service. How are passports doing? What a failed program that is. How are visas doing? That is a failed program. Immigration is a failed program. It goes on and on and on. Service is going down, and the cost of government is going up. Who pays for it? Canadians do.
Finally, I will talk about economic performance. One thing I had hoped the government was going to include in the budget was something addressing the issue of competitiveness. We compete with other countries around the world for capital, for investment and for human resources, and we have a productivity gap in this country that continues to grow. Canadians are producing less and less product. That is undermining our national competitiveness, and it is driving inflationary pressures. Every economist will tell us that. There was nothing in the budget to address that gaping hole in our productivity.
I have had so little time to flesh out why we, as Conservatives, cannot support the budget. This is a failed budget. Canada has a failed government, and Canadians deserve 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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- Apr/25/22 2:45:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the governor also announced that, because of inflation, every single Canadian pays $2,000 more a year. He said Canadians should expect more interest rate increases, leaving millions of Canadians paying more on their mortgages and on their loans. When the governor was asked what this government should do to preserve Canada's fiscal position, he said not to spend too much. Is the minister listening?
Will she finally control her spending, and why has she failed to address Canada's affordability crisis?
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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/7/22 4:49:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” That is a proverb one of my Liberal colleagues used earlier today, but it was in a different context. It was used in the context of Easter. However, the context in which I am going to use it is the budget, which is absolutely bereft of any vision.
The budget is bereft of any vision to meaningfully address what currently matters most to Canadians, which is the skyrocketing cost of living and the housing affordability crisis. There is no real plan to fight the inflation that has exacerbated this government's tax-and-spend profligacy. There is no overarching investment into economic growth, and no growth plan to improve our productivity and our ability to compete in the global marketplace. There is no grand plan to restore Canada's tarnished reputation as a good place to invest. Right now, we are dead last among the OECD countries when it comes to investment. Nor is there is a grand vision to manage the massive debt load that my children and grandchildren will be left to repay, with interest, of course.
Like last year's budget, this one fails to put forward a credible fiscal anchor that outlines a clear pathway and a firm target to return to balance. There is no grand vision for restoring Canada's reputation as a trusted middle power among the world's nations, neither is there a serious plan to harness the power and potential of our sustainably produced natural resources to address the environmental challenges facing our world. In short, this budget fails to deliver the visionary leadership that these times call for. Instead, this budget is emblematic of an unserious Prime Minister, an unserious Minister of Finance and unserious government.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” That is from the Proverbs of Solomon, who is considered to be one of the wisest men ever to walk the earth. We need a vision, and I will have more to say in the days ahead.
Until then and until tomorrow, I move:
That the debate be now adjourned.
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- Apr/4/22 2:32:00 p.m.
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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?
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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/21/22 3:30:16 p.m.
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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.
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