- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman
- Manitoba
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $140,796.07
- Government Page
Mr. Speaker, I am glad to join the debate on the budget implementation act.
There are some interesting numbers in this budget. Total revenues coming in to the government are $456.8 billion and expenses are $446.6 billion. On the surface, when one looks at that, one would think that is not too bad. There is actually some money kicking around, but the problem is the government has run up our national debt so high that the debt charges alone are just shy of $44 billion this year, and they are going to increase to $50 billion. That is creating a deficit this year of $40.1 billion, which is $10 billion higher than what was originally projected.
Why is the interest rate so high? That is because the government, under the Liberal Prime Minister, has run up our national debt so it is now twice as big as what it was when he took office, at $1.2 trillion. That is a travesty, and it is shameful what the government is doing to our taxpayers today and in the future. Our children and grandchildren are going to have to pay off this spending binge that the Liberals have been on for the last eight years.
As shadow minister of national defence, I want to talk a bit about the expenditures in this budget. If we look at the budget and the estimates today, Liberals are going to spend $26.4 billion. That is down from last year's $27.58 billion. Despite the rhetoric coming from the Liberals, they are not spending more, they are spending less. The Prime Minister, we know from leaked documents, has no intention of ever reaching the NATO target of 2% of GDP being spent on our national defence.
However, the Prime Minister has no problem spending $6,000 a night in luxurious hotel rooms in London. He has no problem wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money to go on his luxurious vacations in Jamaica and the Bahamas. It relates back to the Prime Minister just not prioritizing our national defence and how important it is, not only in protecting Canadians here at home, but also in standing up for our allies around the world and having serious relationships.
The Conference of Defence Associations Institute just wrote a letter, signed by 60 prominent Canadians. In it, they say, “Years of restraint, cost cutting, downsizing and deferred investments, have meant that Canada’s defence capabilities have atrophied.” They go on to say, “the recent federal budget was largely a summary of previous announcements without any acknowledgement that the Government must accelerate program spending, and make significant additional funding available to address the long-standing deficiencies in military capabilities and readiness.”
Our safety is not a luxury. We have to make sure we are treating national defence like we do in our homes by buying home insurance and fire insurance and paying the premium. Investment in our military is a premium that we have to pay to protect us at home. In the letter from those 60 prominent Canadians, they said, “Canada cannot afford to conduct 'business as usual'”.
Part of the responsibility we have in national defence is to stand up for our democracy and protecting democracies around the world. For 426 days, we have watched in real time the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine and have witnessed barbaric war crimes and atrocities being committed by Putin's war machine. For 426 days, the people of Ukraine have now only stood up to the Kremlin's genocidal attempt to Russify Ukraine once again.
This is a war of attrition. Vladimir Putin is prepared to play the long game, turning this war into a frozen conflict to let war fatigue overtake western resiliency. Unfortunately, it may be working. I just never dreamed that Canada would be the first ally to show signs of war weariness. One may ask what the proof of that is. In the Liberals' recent budget, the finance minister, surprisingly, offers Ukraine little more than platitudes. So much for her being a champion for Ukraine.
Despite President Zelenskyy asking for more assistance and Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, who was just here, hoping Canada would donate more armoured vehicles and ammunition, budget 2023 provides only $200 million in new spending in military equipment for Ukraine. Much of this is a bookkeeping exercise to account for the eight Leopard tanks that we have donated to Ukraine. We can only hope that the Canadian Armed Forces will use that money to buy new tanks to replace the ones we just donated.
Regrettably, the Prime Minister and his Liberals have spent our fiscal cupboards bare. After eight years of the Liberal government, our national debt has doubled to $1.2 trillion. Our federal deficit is $10 billion higher, and it will soon reach $50 billion, which is more than what we spend on National Defence. The size of our government is $151 billion bigger than it was in 2015.
The Liberals have increased spending on just about everything in this budget except National Defence. A case in point is that they have spent a whopping $22 billion on consultants. As our Conservative leader pointed out in his reply to the budget, “Now the interest costs on the national debt have doubled. We are spending double the national defence budget on the interest costs on the national debt. It is ridiculous.”
Sadly, well-connected consultants, big bankers and wealthy bond holders will get more from these Liberals than our troops will. This is all bad news for taxpayers, and it inhibits Canada's ability from helping allies such as Ukraine or investing in our National Defence during these troubling times in Europe, the Indo-Pacific and our Arctic. To be clear, as His Majesty's loyal opposition, we have supported the military, humanitarian and financial assistance provided to Ukraine by the government, but Canada's Conservatives believe the government can and must do more to help Ukraine win this war.
Conservatives have strongly advocated to increase the production and exportation of our ethical oil and natural gas, along with other energy products, to Europe to displace the Russian oil and gas that is fuelling Putin's war machine. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine 426 days ago, Conservatives have consistently called on the government to send more lethal weapons. In fact, since March 2022, we have been asking the government to donate to Ukraine our armoured ambulances; Harpoon missiles; Role 3 mobile hospitals; sniper rifles; and our soon-to-be-retired fleet of light armoured vehicles, also called LAVs, specifically the Bison, the Coyote and tracked LAVs, also known as M113s.
National Defence confirmed in writing, in its response to an Order Paper question tabled in this House, that it has 149 LAV II Coyotes; 142 M113 tracked LAVs, and 196 LAV II Bisons. These LAVs will soon be replaced with 360 brand new LAV armoured combat support vehicles, which are currently sitting in London, Ontario. Instead of decommissioning our old LAVs and turning them into war memorials or selling them for scrap, the Ukraine defence forces would gladly welcome them. A case in point is that the U.S.A. and Australia donated 130 M113s last summer to Ukraine, and they were crucial in the liberation of Kharkiv.
The Liberals have sadly argued that our Coyotes, Bisons and tracked LAVs are too old, too worn out and have not yet been declared surplus. DND had noted that 62 of the Coyotes were deemed reparable, but they would take 220 days to procure the parts and put them back into service. That was 309 days ago, back in June of last year. Did the Liberal government act? Are we able to donate those LAVs now? Unfortunately, the answer is no, so Ukraine does without.
Regardless of the Liberals' apathy and excuses, I remain confident in the resiliency and ingenuity of the Ukrainian people. I know that if we sent our fleet of older LAVs to Ukraine, the Ukrainians would immediately put them to good use. What works, they would fight with; what does not, they would cannibalize for parts. This is not a novel idea. Just ask our Royal Canadian Air Force. The Liberals stuck it with 18 old, worn-out F-18 Aussie fighter jets, and they had to buy another seven broken fighter jets for the spare parts.
The black, fertile plains of Ukraine are soaked with the blood of millions of innocent people who were murdered during the Holodomor and the Holocaust. We must stand with Ukraine and stop today's genocide being committed by Putin's war machine. Canada must not waiver. We cannot grow weary. We must not falter. During difficult times like these, we remember great leaders such as Sir Winston Churchill, who said in his famous “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech, “victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.” Ukraine must survive. Ukraine must win.
As I said earlier, with respect to National Defence, the Prime Minister does not seem to care. His rhetoric does not match his actions. In the leaked documents that came from the Pentagon that were on the Discord app, it said, “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has told NATO officials privately that Canada will never meet the military alliance’s defense-spending target”. It goes on to say—
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Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand today, as we get to the dying minutes of debate on the bill, to critique the fall economic statement. We have a lot of concerns about the fall economic statement because the Liberal-NDP coalition government failed to address the concerns of Canadians, who are asking how we are going to control the cost of living, how we are going to get inflation under control and how we are going to get government spending under control. We did not see any of that in the fall economic update, and that is why we will not be supporting this bill.
We know that the government, under the Prime Minister, has run up more deficits than every prime minister before him. The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister, as finance minister, have increased our national debt by over half a trillion dollars. Today's national debt sits at over $1.1 trillion. In my opinion, that is child abuse of the next generation. Our kids and grandkids and our great-grandkids are going to be saddled with a debt because of the orgy of spending we have witnessed from the government.
We know that, whenever we run high deficits, inflation gets out of control because there is too much money in circulation. The Bank of Canada then has to intercede. Of course, what does it do? It jacks up interest rates. We are seeing interest rates from the Bank of Canada go up, which is impacting mortgage rates and lending rates, so it is impacting every Canadian, whether they own a business, own a home or are trying to get a job, because the cost of government continues to accelerate the cost of living crisis right across the country. We have not seen this type of inflation since the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. I have always wondered why Liberal times are tough times for Canadians, but I think, like father, like son.
We have the tripling of the carbon tax, which will impact every Canadian's life in a negative way because everyone has to eat. We continue to witness the cost of food escalating out of control. With respect to the net cost of the carbon tax, in my riding in Manitoba, they are going to be paying $1,145 per year per Manitoban more than what they get back in rebate cheques from the government.
Not everyone has the opportunity to take a train or jump on a bus, and this is because they live in rural parts of the country. They have to drive to get to work. Maybe they are retired, living on a fixed income, and need to drive to see their doctor in the city. Maybe they want to retire out at the lake. I have in my riding the beautiful shores of Lake Winnipeg and Lake Manitoba. Canadians, and especially people in Winnipeg, want to move out there and enjoy their retirement time.
It is going to cost them more just to commute back and forth to the city, to visit their doctors and do their shopping, and the government seems to callously not care. This is hurting those seniors. It is hurting rural Canadians who are driving around to get their kids to hockey, soccer or other sporting events. Sometimes they want a drive to school. It is not like they can just jump on a bus to get there. They have to drive since there is no other option.
There is also the idea that everybody is going to be able to switch to electric vehicles, which still have not been tested in the severe climate we have during the winter months in Canada. They have not actually taken a hard look at how we would go long distances, especially in rural areas where they do not have rapid charge stations, or how the electricity to charge these vehicles would be generated. Would it be clean hydro, like we have in Manitoba, or would it come from thermal-fired generation plants, using either natural gas or, even worse, coal? We have to look at the overall carbon footprint that it would be creating.
No one is getting hurt more by this, though, than farmers producing food, and the cost is impacting food inflation. I have to remind Liberals of this all the time, but they put a carbon tax on the price of growing that food. Thankfully, we just recently passed a bill from the Conservatives that would reduce the carbon tax being paid by farmers, especially on heating their buildings and drying their grain, but still, after that food is grown on the farm, it has to go on a truck and hauled to a processing facility. Often it gets put on a train after that, and every time they haul it, there is carbon tax.
That will continue to increase the cost of production. It will increase the price of that food stock. Whether it is bread, beer or vegetables, every time it goes through an energy system of transportation or processing, the cost of food will increase disproportionately.
I want to talk a little about national defence. As the shadow minister of national defence, I am concerned that some of the spending in the fall economic statement does not recognize the threat environment we are currently in, not just because of the war of Ukraine, with Russian's aggression and its genocidal war atrocities being committed by Putin's war machine in Ukraine, but also because we are seeing a lot of sabre-rattling coming out of China these days, out of Beijing, with President Xi talking about Taiwan and trying to take Taiwan into that system by force. We need to make sure that Canada, through our Canadian Armed Forces, is prepared to protect Canada, in our Arctic, on the Pacific and on the Atlantic.
We are seeing, again, this year, that the Liberals are allowing defence spending to lapse. At over $2.5 billion, this is the biggest lapse of spending we have seen since they took office. Last year, it was $1.24 billion. Since they introduced their defence policy, SSE, they have allowed over $6.8 billion to lapse.
They said that they would never allow a cent to lapse, but here is money that should be invested, in an expedient manner, in our Canadian Armed Forces to buy equipment and deal with the recruitment crisis, yet we are not seeing that turn into assets for our forces to use to defend Canada and protect our interests around the world while we fight beside our allies against adversaries, as we are witnessing happening in Ukraine today. Because of their slow investment and inability to invest in the proper procurement, we do not have our surface combatants yet, or even the design finalized.
We are not seeing NORAD modernization done in an expedient manner. We know that NORAD is critical to continental security. It is critical to our relationship with the United States and we still have not seen how we are going to update our North Warning System. We are not seeing how we are going to make sure that we have submarines that can go under the ice and other monitoring systems, whether they are unmanned vehicles or not, to monitor what is happening in our Arctic sea.
We are not seeing the investment in that continental security, no only in the Arctic but also in making sure that we are getting more of our assets to our borders to help with our continental security.
The case in point is that, in this economic statement, they announced they are going to extend the lease on the auxiliary offshore replenishment ship we have, the Asterix, which is privately owned with federal leasing, but it ends in 2025. We still do not have our first joint supply ship in the water. Why would we only want to have one vessel when we are trying to project our abilities beyond our shores?
If we want to have a blue water fleet, then we better have offshore oil replenishment capabilities in the Atlantic and in the Pacific. We need to make sure that we have the ability to also deal with things like maintenance on those vessels once they are out to sea. Having one on each coast is not enough. We need to have at least one more ship to deal with the need to provide that scheduled maintenance, which happens throughout their life cycle. We need to have that extra ship to sail, and we have to think long term on why we need another AOR.
We still have not signed the lease on our F-35s. The government has been sitting on its hands instead of signing the contract to make sure that we buy the F-35s. The surface combatants need to get in the water to get built.
There is no money in here to deal with the real crisis happening today in the Canadian Armed Forces, which is recruitment. Chief of the Defence Staff General Wayne Eyre has said that this is a crisis. I say that it is a catastrophe, and we need to deal with that very quickly.
We have a lot of needs, but we are getting no vision. It seems like everything these Liberals touch, they break.
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