- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley
- Manitoba
- Voting Attendance: 65%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $99,486.97
- Government Page
- Apr/29/24 12:31:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to draw to the member's attention to, in the 2021 Liberal campaign platform, a promise that has been unkept, the $4.5-billion mental health transfer. They put that promise out in front of Canadians because they wanted Canadians to vote for them, to elect them to be the government, and then they abandoned it. There is no mention of that in the last three budgets, including this budget.
I ask the member to stand up right now and tell the House where the Canada mental health transfer is. Where is the $4.5 billion?
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- Apr/18/24 3:59:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, of course, the member is saying what all Liberals say, that Canadians have never had it so good. They think that everything is great.
It was not my advice. I do not expect him to take my advice. Bill Morneau does not like the budget. Paul Manley does not like the budget. Many of the other economists I mentioned in my speech do not like the budget. There has been a great deal of criticism over changes in tax policy that will actually penalize productivity growth in this country. He does not have to take it from me. He just has to open up a newspaper and read it for himself.
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Mr. Speaker, this budget is ironically called “Fairness for Every Generation.”
After nine years of the Prime Minister trying to make things fair, he sure has not done a very good job. Things are not fair.
Is it fair to every generation that every year life is less affordable? Is it fair to every generation that rents are sky-high? Is it fair to every generation that one in four kids cannot afford to eat? Is it fair to every generation that it takes almost 20 years just to save up for a down payment?
The Prime Minister is not worth the cost for any generation. This is the ninth straight year of deficit spending. In 2015, the federal debt was $616 billion, accumulated from 1867, when Canada began. Today, it is $1.25 trillion, double. The Prime Minister has borrowed more money than all other prime ministers combined.
The result is that, after 20 years of low inflation and interest rates, the Prime Minister's irresponsible inflationary spending has upended Canada's stable economy.
This year, Canada will spend $54.1 billion on interest to wealthy bankers and bondholders, instead of to doctors and nurses, to service the Prime Minister's debt. That is the same amount collected in GST. We should change the name of that tax from the GST to the DST, the debt servicing tax. It is also more money than the government spends on health care or on the Canada child benefit.
This is what happens when a Prime Minister does not want to think about monetary policy. The result is that mortgage payments have doubled, down payments have doubled, rents have doubled, the cost of gas, groceries and home heating have skyrocketed, and people cannot afford to eat, heat or house themselves.
Instead of reining in spending to bring inflation under control, the Prime Minister acts like a pyromaniac, throwing another $40 billion on the inflationary fire. This is despite warnings from economists, including Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem, who cautioned that government spending is at the upper bound. This will make it much harder for the bank to lower interest rates.
This is not a partisan point. Former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page expressed this yesterday, telling Global News, “We gotta get those interest rates down. So on a net basis, this is just not good for inflation.” Former Liberal finance minister John Manley also warned this government months ago that it was pressing on the inflationary gas pedal with its spending. Even former Liberal-appointed governor of the Bank of Canada David Dodge said he believes that this will be the “worst budget” since 1982.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. After nine deficits and doubling the national debt, Canada is less fair and Canadians are worse off.
Now the finance minister says that what Canadians really want is a stronger government to make things fairer. By making government bigger, the Liberals have made citizens weaker. Conservatives believe that smaller government makes for bigger citizens.
This is not a government that gives people everything they want. It is a government that takes everything they have. Members do not have to take it from me. Just yesterday, in the Financial Post, it was written, “we’ve become a growth laggard and our living standards have largely stagnated for the better part of a decade.”
Part of our declining standard of living has to do with the fact that Canada has the worst productivity in the G7. Our GDP growth has been driven primarily by population and labour force growth, not productivity improvements. That may increase the total amount of goods and services, but it does not translate into increased living standards.
This is a real crisis. From 2000 to 2023, the growth rate of Canada's real per person GDP was 0.7%. That is meaningfully worse than the G7 average of 1% and the United States', whose GDP per person growth rate was 1.2%, almost double. Our country is facing a productivity crisis that threatens to erode this country’s standard of living and erase many Canadians' hopes for a more prosperous future.
Just a few weeks ago the Bank of Canada's deputy governor Carolyn Rogers said that we have a productivity emergency, and “in case of emergency, break glass.” Even former Liberal finance minister Bill Morneau says the budget is a threat to investment and economic growth.
It is time to take action by, for instance, reducing regulatory barriers to investment, celebrating entrepreneurship, bolstering the profit incentive for private investment and loosening the federal government's tight grip on the economy. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister does the exact opposite.
There has been one change, though. The borrow-and-spend Liberals are now the tax-and-spend Liberals. On top of gouging Canadians with their April 1 tax hikes, they have decided that they know better how to spend businesses' money than the hard-working Canadians who actually run those businesses.
This is not a partisan point. Dan Kelly, president of the CFIB, said, “What worries me the most about [these tax] changes is the potential to demotivate Canadians from getting into business in the first place or working hard to grow a small business to a medium-sized business”. He is not the only one.
Harley Finkelstein, president of Canada’s greatest tech company, Shopify, said:
We need to be doing everything we can to turn Canada into the best place for entrepreneurs to build.
What's proposed in the federal budget will do the complete opposite. Innovators and entrepreneurs will suffer and their success will be penalized—this is...a tax on innovation and risk taking.
Our policy failures are America's gains. At a time when our country is facing critically low productivity and business investment our political leaders are failing our country's entrepreneurs.
For nine years, the Prime Minister has told Canadians that the rich would pay for the cost of his spending, but the truth is that it has been everyday Canadians who have been the ones paying. The Prime Minister has already raised his punishing carbon tax by 23% on April 1, and with $40 billion in new inflationary spending, Canadians will continue to pay the inflation tax that hurts the poorest among us the most. Whatever the Prime Minister says, it will not be him and his billionaire friends who pay for new spending. It will be single moms, workers and small business owners.
We cannot tax our way to prosperity, and no government program can increase productivity better than the power of the free market, spurred on by Canadian entrepreneurs. We need to celebrate entrepreneurship in this country, not punish it.
Conservatives had three simple demands for the budget: axe the tax on farmers and food by immediately passing Bill C-234 in its original form; build the homes, not bureaucracy, by requiring cities to permit 15% more homebuilding each year as a condition for receiving federal infrastructure money; and cap spending with a dollar-for-dollar rule to bring down interest rates and inflation. The government must find a dollar in savings for every dollar of spending.
The Prime Minister did none of those things, and for those reasons, Conservatives will not be supporting the budget.
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- Apr/18/24 3:43:04 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to take the member back to the Liberal platform of 2021, called “Forward. For Everyone.” In that platform, the Liberals' promise was not small; it was a major promise of $4.5 billion for the Canada mental health transfer, which would be implemented over five years. That was almost three years ago. Why has it not been dealt with in this latest budget? Is this another broken Liberal promise?
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Madam Speaker, given that we are discussing the fall economic statement, is she concerned with the increase in the size of the national debt? In 2015, the national debt was $600 billion. After eight years, the government actually managed to double it. In fact, it has spent more money than all other prime ministers combined.
Is she not concerned that we are on the wrong trajectory and that we need to get our budgets under control?
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- Jun/21/23 9:42:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, finally I hear another member of Parliament say it is a good idea to have a plan to balance the budget.
I hope that the members of the Liberal Party are paying attention to the good common sense of the Bloc MP, the instruction of the IMF, and not just relying on how they view partisan interests of other members of Parliament.
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- Jun/21/23 9:37:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the compliment. I know everybody is waiting with bated breath to hear what I have to say next. I will try not to disappoint.
The fact of the matter is the IMF is now urging Canada to bring a debt anchor and to keep fiscal policy tight. What does that mean, keeping fiscal policy tight? It means moving toward balanced budgets, not just relying on what they might call fiscal guardrails or reducing debt-to-GDP ratios, but actually having a hard fiscal anchor. This is the IMF talking, not me. A hard fiscal anchor. What they mean is a plan to get back to balanced budgets.
The Bank of Canada, to its credit, has been engaged in a policy of fiscal tightening, trying to reduce the money supply and raising interest rates, trying to grapple with the scourge of inflation. The problem is that the fiscal policy of the Government of Canada is running counter to that.
We have loose fiscal policy in this country, meaning that billions and billions of dollars are still going out the door of the budget this year. It was $495 billion, almost half a trillion dollars. Mr. Speaker, I know you have been here for a while, and I know you know that is a lot of money. It is way more than it was even in 2019.
We have a real issue in this country, and I think we need to bridge the gap. We need the government and its coalition partners to take this concept seriously, go back to the drawing board and at least come back with a plan. That is all this motion asks for, not to balance the budget tomorrow or at two o'clock this morning when we are voting on the appropriations, but to come back soon with a plan, just like they had for 2027, to bring the budget back into balance.
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- Jun/21/23 9:24:06 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that seemed like a very well-reasoned, well thought-out speech. However, the motion that we are debating right now has a question, and the question is whether or not the government should be called upon to table a plan to return to balanced budgets.
I wonder if the member would agree that governments, no matter what their political stripe, should strive to at least create a plan to have balanced budgets?
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- Jun/21/23 9:09:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I listened with interest to the member's speech. He said something to the effect that Liberals do not cut anything, that they never cut anything and they always make investments. I wonder if he is aware of the most draconian budget in Canadian history, by a government that did not just cut program spending but actually also cut health transfers and education transfers to provinces. It was delivered on February 27, 1995, by then finance minister Paul Martin. I wonder if he could advise us whether he is aware of those cuts.
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- Jun/21/23 8:22:18 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to clarify one thing. The member said the motion called for the government to balance the budget. Actually, the motion simply calls for a plan from the government to balance the budget. I thought it had one, because in November it tabled the fall economic statement, which called for a balanced budget in 2027-28.
The member has equated, somehow through his warped logic, that balancing the budget equates to cuts. Given the fact that the government's plan is to balance the budget by 2027-28, what is it going to cut?
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- Jun/21/23 6:32:56 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I very much enjoy working with my colleague from the Bloc at the finance committee. I find him to be an articulate and thoughtful member of the committee.
Our motion is basically to call on the government to balance budgets. I will note that, during the 2015 campaign, the Prime Minister promised he would balance the budget by 2019. Just recently, in the fall economic statement, the government had projected a surplus in the 2027-28 year. It quickly reneged on that in this budget on March 28.
Could the member share his thoughts on how anyone can believe anything the government says when it comes to balancing budgets?
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- Jun/7/23 8:04:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, there is one aspect of the budget on which I want to get clarification.
In the fall economic statement, in the 2027-28 business year, the fall economic statement projected a $4.5-billion surplus. Only 140 days later, on March 28, the budget introduced a table for the same year that showed a $14-billion deficit, an $18.5-billion swing.
I wonder if the member could give us some details as to why there was the change.
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- May/29/23 9:40:47 p.m.
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Madam Chair, its main job is to keep inflation at 2%.
How much does the minister's budget project inflation will be this year?
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- May/15/23 2:54:46 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the finance minister plans to spend $490 billion in this budget but is refusing to show up at the finance committee for just two hours to answer questions. The budget would drive every Canadian family another $4,200 into debt. Canada has the fifth-highest increase in government spending and the third-largest increase in our debt-to-GDP ratio. Our debt has increased faster than that of almost every other advanced country. Just last November, the finance minister promised to balance the budget by 2028. In this budget, her deficits go on forever and ever. Why is she breaking that promise?
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- May/9/23 10:29:10 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, my colleagues know that I am a numbers guy. I love the finance committee, and I agree 100%. I would like nothing better than to be debating the budget, but the Liberals cut off debate on the budget. Therefore, we cannot talk in the House about, for example, the fact that they have doubled the national debt in the last six years, from $600 billion to $1.2 trillion, because the government and the costly coalition NDP partners actually quashed debate in the House about that.
I agree wholeheartedly, but the fact of the matter is that action should have been taken early on, two years ago, to let the member for Wellington—Halton Hills know this was going on and to call a public inquiry.
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- Apr/27/23 12:32:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, in 1995, the most draconian budget in Canadian history was brought in by Liberal finance minister Paul Martin. Why did he do it? It was because he had to. He had to do it because the Government of Canada was broke. It could no longer borrow money. It had hit a wall. The Wall Street Journal was saying that Canada was an economic basket case, because interest rates were high and debt was high, and the Government of Canada could no longer afford to maintain its credit rating or pay for the important programs Canadians required. That is where we are heading today.
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- Apr/27/23 12:14:44 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I note that the member did not discuss the deficits that are projected in the budget. If we look through to 2027-28, they project that the combined debt of Canada will be over $1.3 trillion, which is more than double what it was when the government took office. Does he think that qualifies as being fiscally responsible?
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Madam Speaker, the Parliamentary Budget Officer reviewed the budget and identified close to $800 million in what the government is calling non-announced spending. This would be in addition to the billions of dollars in non-announced spending announced last year.
I am wondering if the member could tell us what this spending would be for.
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Madam Speaker, I want to congratulate my friend from Winnipeg on his sartorial selections today. They look very good on him.
I have a question about the budget itself. The budget projects that this year, over $40 billion will go to interest on the debt, to wealthy bankers and bondholders. That is almost as much as the $50 billion being spent on the Canada health transfer.
How does the member justify the Liberals giving almost exactly the same amount to wealthy banks and bondholders as they are to Canadians for health care?
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Madam Speaker, in the Parliamentary Budget Officer's review of the fall economic statement, Bill C-32, he categorized $14.2 billion as unannounced spending. I am just wondering if, before we go to actually vote on this bill, the member would tell us what the details of that spending are.
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