- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Banff—Airdrie
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $145,439.36
- Government Page
- Apr/29/24 6:04:19 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, what is the legacy of the current Liberal Prime Minister? Sadly, his entire legacy amounts to one thing. The Prime Minister has grown the national debt more in nine years than under every other prime minister in Canadian history before him combined. That is his legacy. That is the end of it. That is the only thing that he stands for and has as a legacy. That debt now stands at $1.3 trillion, which is an enormous number. It is actually hard to comprehend or even imagine for just about any Canadian. It is really hard to visualize how much money we are even talking about there, so I want to break that down just a little bit.
First of all, our national debt of $1.3 trillion is relative to a $2-trillion national economy. For every dollar the Canadian economy generates, about 65¢ of it has an obligation attached to it. Now, a trillion dollars is a massive amount of money. If we cashed it into $100 bills and stacked those bills into billion-dollar piles, we would have 1,000 piles, each climbing about a kilometre high. That is what we are talking about in terms of what this money would look like. However, that is still viewing the situation from 20,000 feet, so let us zoom in at the ground level for a little better perspective.
For Canada's population of about 39 million people, the share of the total national debt is now about $34,000 for every person in the country. For every family of five in Canada, there is about $170,000 in debt. We can think about what that could mean for the average Canadian family of five and what they could do with that $170,000, if they had that for themselves instead of it being their share of the national debt.
Let us say a person has kids in hockey. A good, reasonably decent youth composite hockey stick, which everyone uses nowadays, is about $90 or so. The kids in that family of five would certainly never have to worry about breaking a hockey stick ever again. In fact, every one of their friends would never have to worry about it again either, because that $170,000 would buy about 1,800 hockey sticks.
A family of five can easily spend $400 or more a week on groceries these days with all the inflation, which means that $170,000 would cover food for that whole family for over eight years. Instead, under the Liberals, Canadian families are struggling to feed themselves. Food banks in Canada received a record two million visits in a single month last year, with a million additional people expected this year.
Examples of what Canadians could do with their own money is endless, but those dollars are not enriching Canadian families at all under the Liberal government. Those dollars represent the money that is owed to bankers and bondholders as their share of the Prime Minister's debt. It is interesting to be able to visualize that, but it is not a theoretical exercise. It is actually having real impacts on Canadians right now here today. The Prime Minister's inflationary deficits are driving up interest rates. He is endangering our social safety nets and our jobs by adding more inflationary debt. His government has caused rent and mortgage payment costs to double and made it harder to save for a down payment for so many young families who are just dreaming of getting into the housing market for the first time but wondering how that will ever be possible.
Those are the problems facing Canada right now, but what is the fix? Common-sense Conservatives have solutions. In fact, we have offered the Liberals a starting point to fix it. We told the Prime Minister that we would support his budget if he would just take three very simple, small little steps towards addressing the affordability issues that are plaguing Canadians by starting to address the debt. We needed to see the Liberal government, at minimum, axe the Liberal tax on food, focus on building homes and not building up more federal government bureaucracy and cap the out-of-control government spending by finding a dollar in savings for every new dollar in spending.
The Liberals did none of that. Instead, they went further down the road of recklessness, adding $40 billion more to the growing federal debt.
Common-sense Conservatives cannot support a budget that continues to further indebt Canadians. We will vote non-confidence in a Prime Minister that has driven this country into the ground. I want to know this: Will the NDP have the backbone to do the same?
The government needs to be run in the same way that people have to run their households. A Canadian family that found itself paying more on their credit card debt and on interest than on their necessities would quickly realize that they had to address their debt load. The government, in a similar circumstance, chooses to open new lines of credit to keep on spending. If the government approached budgeting the way Canadian households have to, with actual needs weighed against available resources, the craziness of paying more to bankers and bondholders in one year than what it funds the provinces for health care would be apparent to every single other Canadian, but not to the people sitting on those benches over there in the Liberal government.
Under this government, the promise of Canada has become a promissory note to its debt holders. The Liberals have tried to rebrand their undisciplined fiscal policy as equal to the aspirations of Canadians, but let us look at the real promise of Canada. It is not the agenda of bigger government that the government promotes. It is certainly not about transforming society to reflect Liberal ideology, despite what Liberals would have people believe.
The promise of Canada is, in fact, about the opportunity and freedom to forge one's way in life. Canada has long held out the hope of achievement and prosperity for those who do the work and follow the rules, that a comfortable, secure, middle-class existence is open to anyone from any walk of life, from anywhere in the world, who works to earns it.
In year nine of the Liberal government, life in Canada has never been more unaffordable. The middle class is just a distant dream for far too many. Canadians looking for the Liberals to change things in their budget this year must be feeling incredibly disappointed, with reckless spending, deeper debt and deficits and, of course, the harmful carbon tax.
With these and other policies, Liberals are fuelling inflation and an affordability crisis, pushing middle-class aspirations even further out of the reach of many. Struggling families cannot afford more inflationary spending that drives up their cost of living. They cannot afford the interest rates on their mortgages, their taxes, all of these things.
Even Liberal spending on social programs is not as it actually seems. Many of the measures announced in the budget are deferred, so that the government can make feel-good promises now and then try to find loopholes to get out of them later. We have seen that with dental care and the other social spending Liberals have rolled out that did not quite come anywhere near as advertised. We are seeing it with defence spending promises that stretch out 20 years into the future, when they are needed now.
After nine years, the Liberals' budget is just more of the same that brought us into this mess in the first place. The Prime Minister is proving that he is not worth the cost for any generation, and it will be generations well into the future that will have to repay all of his debt.
It is clear that only common-sense Conservatives have a plan to stop the inflationary deficits that are driving up interest rates. We will protect Canada's social programs and jobs by stopping the piling-on of more federal debt.
Only common-sense Conservatives have a plan to bring down the cost of energy, food and everything else. We will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. Conservatives will govern with common sense for this country, for all its people, in all its regions.
Canada's middle-class dream can once again eclipse the Liberals' debt and deficit nightmare.
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Madam Speaker, nostalgia is a strange thing. Sometimes it is quite surprising and remarkable what kinds of longings it can spark. When we start to skim through the contents of the 2023 budget, it is almost enough to make one nostalgic for the days, not so long ago, when the Liberal government failed to table a budget for over two years.
I say that mostly in jest, of course, but the point I am making is that, while this budget is being tabled by a Liberal government, it is certainly not a classically Liberal budget. For that, we have to think back to the 1990s when fiscal policy was something that the then Liberal prime minister at least spent a bit of time thinking about. This was when the then prime minister's finance minister at least viewed deficits as an obstacle along the road to prosperity and not a destination in and of itself.
The incarnation of the Liberal government under the Prime Minister and the finance minister would certainly be unrecognizable to Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. Members across the way who remember when their leaders held at least some concern for fiscal responsibility ought to reflect on just how far off path their party has wandered. Maybe if they did that, they would feel a little nostalgic themselves.
With contents such as bigger government, higher taxes and more debt, this document reads less like a budget and more like a 270-page love letter from the Prime Minister to the spendthrifts who have overtaken the Liberal Party, and to those already well-established among its partners in the New Democratic Party. At a time of massive debt, this budget proposes $67 billion in new spending, and all of this is being thrown on the heap of huge debt and deficits that has already been racked up by the Prime Minister over the last eight years, which amounts to more than all of the debt accrued by all previous prime ministers combined.
This 2023 federal budget would add significantly to the high debt, deep-deficit turbulence that is shaking our economy. A cost of living crisis is ongoing, and inflation is eroding Canadians' paycheques at the same time it is increasing their bills. Therefore, naturally, the Liberal government somehow sees this as the ideal time to add to their burdens by increasing their taxes and the debt they owe. With this budget, every Canadian household's share of the federal debt is now in the range of about $81,000.
This debt is unaffordable, as $43 billion would be syphoned off, away from services for Canadians, to service the interest on that debt. That money would have to be replaced through that much more borrowing. It is unsustainable. Canadians not even born yet, and even their kids, their grandkids and their great-great-grandkids, will be on the hook to pay back the bankers for the Liberals' eight-year spending spree. Hopefully, that is where it stops.
It is unfocused because, if the purpose of a federal budget is to present a path forward to future prosperity for Canadians, this document clearly misses the mark. It sacrifices the dinner table concerns of everyday Canadians on the altar of the costly coalition's big government ideology. The real problems facing this country get eclipsed in deference to the partisan priorities of the Liberal-NDP partners.
This budget has the dubious distinction of being notable not for its contents, but for what it does not contain. Canadians seeking relief from the inflation crisis will not find here a reversal of the inflationary deficits and taxes that would allow workers to bring home more of their own earnings. Lowering taxes and leaving more of their money in Canadians' pockets is the single most effective way the government could have helped citizens in a cost of living crisis. The Liberals do not want to do that because that would mean more cash for Canadians to decide how best to spend it on their own priorities and less for the government to hand out on what it perceives that to be.
Instead of empowering Canadians through more powerful paycheques, the budget proposes yet more new programs for them to fund through Canadians' paying more taxes. This increases taxpayers' obligations too, and therefore their reliance upon, bigger government, and that is exactly the way the Liberals want it.
The Liberals fancy themselves as gatekeepers. This paternalistic government does not trust Canadians to best deploy their own dollars, so it sets itself up instead as the arbiter of how Canadians' money can best be used. This is a spoiler alert, but in their minds, that best use is not for the priorities of Canadians. Rather, it is to fund the Liberal-NDP agenda.
Canadians will also not find in this budget a blueprint for a freer, more responsive economy, one that removes the government gatekeepers who use restrictions and red tape to complicate problems rather than streamlining processes to provide solutions.
We need more housing in this country, but we have too many gatekeepers running interference. Canadians are looking for a smart, responsive policy that enables the free market to work as it should, respond to demand and provide the affordable housing stock a growing population needs.
Canadians will not find measures along that line in this budget. Rather than creating solutions to the problems that exist, the Liberals create new problems that impact housing, such as the way they have implemented their underused housing tax, for example. Taxing Canadians under the guise of going after foreign speculators, costing Canadians massive amount of accounting and administrative fees and making them fill out all kinds of forms to force them to justify the use of their own properties will not do anything to address the housing crisis that has vastly worsened under the Liberals. These are the kinds of things the government does instead of getting serious about addressing the real problems facing Canadians.
Not only that, but young Canadians looking to save up for their first home would find that task just a bit easier if the budget had simply ended the carbon tax hikes and the deficit spending that continue to drive up inflation and interest rates, and make life more unaffordable. Instead of listening to Canadians, Liberals are continuing with their war on work and increasing taxes, which means workers are punished for working, and taking home even less of their pay.
What they do take home, the Liberal fiscal policy driving the affordability crisis is steadily eroding. Items as essential as food are becoming increasingly harder for Canadians to afford. Good nutritious options are becoming luxury items for far too many pantries as household budgets are stretched to the breaking point. In my riding, for example, food banks in Airdrie, Cochrane, Morley and Bow Valley are struggling with at least a 50% increase in demand over the previous year, yet the government continues to find ways to fuel that inflation with further spending, and more families in communities in my home province of Alberta are struggling, just as families right across the country are.
For example, an oil and gas worker in Alberta, with a family of four to feed, is forecast to spend up to over $1,000 more on food this year, according to “Canada's Food Price Report 2023”, and that is almost $600 more than the rebate they will receive. That money has to come off of an already smaller paycheque that worker is trying to make due with, so it is that same trend. The government insists on taking more of the hard-earned dollars from Canadians for its big government agenda, while leaving Canadians with less to fend for themselves.
The government is not also forcing Canadians to make due with smaller paycheques, but also penalizing their community to earn them. The carbon tax increased to 14¢ per litre on April 1, making it more expensive for Canadians to get to work. The Parliamentary Budget Officer shows the carbon tax will cost the average family somewhere between $402 and $847. That is even after the supposed rebates. That blows a huge hole in the Liberals' claim that their scheme is revenue neutral. By 2030, the government's carbon taxes could add 50¢ per litre to the price of gasoline. That is all in addition to the new payroll taxes the government is putting on workers and employers as well.
These tax-and-spend policies, and others like them, have a human cost, with everyday impacts on people struggling just to get by, and giving back some of the crumbs of the feast the government takes for itself is not going to fix those impacts. Acting on the financial mess they are causing will be the solution, but it is clear that nothing is going to change with the Liberal government.
Canada's federal debt for 2023-24 is projected to reach $1.22 trillion. The 2023-24 deficit is projected to be $40.1 billion. Eight years of the same old has become this tired group's stock and trade. There is no path to balance in Canada's future budget projections. It is just another Liberal promise broken. No matter what the challenges are that are facing the nation, the Liberals always default to their instincts for bigger government, higher taxes, more restrictions and fewer freedoms, to the detriment of hard-working Canadians. Their record proves it.
We need a Conservative government in this country that will prioritize the needs of people instead of its own friends, like the Liberal Party has done. It is time for change, and it cannot come soon enough for Canadians.
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