- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- South Shore—St. Margarets
- Nova Scotia
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $136,927.65
- Government Page
- May/30/24 11:06:31 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, forgive me if I do not believe the math of the Liberals, who have not met a single budget target at any time and have said the budget will balance itself. Maybe when the previous member, the member for Kingston and the Islands, who brought it up, did the math, the kilometres were based on the $150,000 Ford Lightning he drives. He should try using a normal vehicle, like most Canadians drive.
I understand why the member is embarrassed by that fact, but the Liberals made the carbon tax go up on April 1, April Fool's Day, by 23%. They are continuing to do that and plan to make it go up by 65¢ a litre by 2030. The Liberals have no compassion for people who are suffering because of their tax policy.
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- May/21/24 5:07:29 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thought my speech made it clear. This budget, with its fiscal irresponsibility and efforts to continue to destroy the Canadian competitive advantage of our natural resources, is so significantly dire that we are at a crucial economic turning point for our country. If this is not reversed shortly, we would be in a spiral that would be very difficult to get out of. All we have to do is look at countries such as Argentina, and others with similar resources that had governments that were not willing to develop their natural resources, to see what our economic future under the Liberal vision entails.
Conservatives also believe that we should have a balanced budget. The Liberals used to believe that. In 2015, they said they would balance it in 2019. How has that gone so far? We are now up to a $40-billion deficit after nine years. Every single year, there is a deficit. I guess the Liberal promise in 2015 is not worth any more than the Liberal promise today of this budget.
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- May/21/24 4:50:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I listened intently to the member's speech, but I did not hear any explanation from that member as to why, as the first speaker, she thought it was appropriate that time allocation be put on the budget bill on a half a trillion dollars of spending, limiting debate before it even starts. I would like her to explain to this House, if she could, why she thinks that not having sufficient debate on this spending is a good idea.
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- May/21/24 12:00:38 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the simple answer is that the budget has been widely panned by just about everybody in the country. I am surprised that the government wants to get on to debating it, since it has not actually tabled parts of the budget that it has talked about.
This is perhaps even more important to what happens to Canadians in the future than this flawed budget. It is about what is going to happen, how we regulate artificial intelligence, how it uses people's data and how we interact with it in the future. It is probably one of the most fundamental things. That is why Canadians want the bill separated. That is why it is vitally important that we do that now.
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- Nov/22/23 4:33:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that. Those who had the joy of sitting on the finance committee and listening to me speak for 18 hours while the Minister of Finance would not show up to defend her budget know I can go for 18 hours if members would like. I appreciate—
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- Oct/17/23 3:00:36 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberal minister is talking about search and rescue when Canadians cannot put food on their tables.
Melody Horton of Bridgewater had to sell her dream home because of the increase in her mortgage costs. She does not agree with these Liberals that they have never had it so good. The new projected deficit of $46 billion for this year means higher costs and higher monthly payments for Melody and for all Canadians, including that Liberal minister's constituents.
The Prime Minister is not worth the cost. When will the Prime Minister stop harming Canadians with his inflationary deficits and balance a budget to lower costs on Canadians?
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- Jun/21/23 3:38:23 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will reinform the House that I serve as the vice-chair of the industry committee; as such, in that role, I have had access to the two Volkswagen contracts. Those two contracts, as we know the Parliamentary Budget Officer has said, are already $3 billion over budget, so—
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Mr. Speaker, it is another promise made and broken. The Liberals were never going to do omnibus bills, but every single budget bill they have had has amended acts of Parliament that had nothing to do with the budget. They have done it yet again. Canadians have come to expect they cannot trust anything the Liberal government says, whether it is on the finances or how it is going to operate Parliament.
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Mr. Speaker, I look forward to hearing the intervention of the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent.
My comments today lead off the comments of His Majesty's loyal opposition on Bill C-47. That is the Liberals' budget implementation bill. The question before us is whether anything in this budget bill will actually be true when we look at the promises of the Liberals compared with the results.
I want to put the record spending in this budget plan into some historical context. I know the Liberals are a little challenged on math sometimes, so please bear with me. I hope they can follow it.
In the federal election of 1968, Pierre Trudeau reassured Canadians that a Liberal government would not raise taxes or increase spending. During the election, he said that the government was not Santa Claus. How did that work out? When Pierre Trudeau became prime minister, real government spending increased from 17% of the GDP to 24.3%. In other words, the federal government's share of the economy rose 42% under Pierre Trudeau. Every single area of federal government spending increased, except defence spending, where Pierre Trudeau cut spending in half as a percentage of the budget. When Pierre Trudeau took office, we spent more on national defence than we did on servicing the country's debt. When he left office in 1984, for every dollar the government spent on defence, we spent $3 on paying the interest on his national debt.
Let us look at this another way. The deficit Pierre Trudeau ran in his last year of office was 8.3% of the GDP. Based on Canada's GDP in 2022, Pierre Trudeau's 8.3% of GDP deficit would be like an annual deficit of $157 billion today. His record was to drive Canada's debt from $262 billion when he became prime minister to $700 billion when he left office. Pierre Trudeau added $438 billion to Canada's debt, almost tripling it. This was from a Liberal leader who said he would not run deficits when he was first elected in 1968 and that the government was no Santa Claus.
I raise this because, as the adage goes, like father like son. By the time Pierre Trudeau left office in 1984, 38¢ of every dollar that the federal government spent was to pay interest on the debt that he had built up. His policies of massive spending led to a rapid rise in interest rates to try to reduce inflation. All that government spending simply made it worse. Interest rates rose to 21%.
Like his father, the current Liberal leader promised Canadians in his first election in 2015 that, even though Canada was running a robust growing economy and had a balanced budget left by the Harper government, he would run modest stimulus deficits. However, in 2019, it would be balanced. The platform that the Liberals all stood on in 2015 said: “We will run modest deficits for three years so that we can invest in growth for the middle class and credibly offer a plan to balance the budget in 2019” and “we will...reduce the federal debt-to-GDP ratio to 27 percent”.
Did he have a balanced budget in 2019, as he promised and as his father also promised in his first term? No, he did not: like father like son. The Liberals produced a $20-billion deficit in 2019. Promises were made, and promises were broken.
Did the Liberals reduce their first fiscal anchor of 27% of the GDP? No, they did not. It was 31% in 2019, so another promise was made and broken.
In the new Liberal budget after 2019, there was no longer talk of a balanced budget. The debt-to-GDP ratio was the new fiscal anchor. It would remain the same during the four years of that fiscal plan, even though that meant they would be spending more. We know that at least the promise to spend more and not to balance the budget was true.
We then had an early and unnecessary election in 2021. What did the Liberal platform say then about promises for the country's finances? There was no talk of balanced budgets until perhaps 2050, but the Liberals did promise to drop the debt-to-GDP ratio from 48.5% in 2021-22. We should remember that in 2019, their campaign promise said that, in 2022, the debt-to-GDP ratio would be 31%, not 48%.
What does the bill project for this year? The budget set the cumulative spending for the next five years at a record $3.1 trillion. We should remember that, in the fall, they promised that the budget would be balanced. However, if these numbers are to be believed, and if they did not add more spending in the rest of their term, they would add another $130 billion to the national debt. The national debt would rise to a record $1.3 trillion. The Liberals project that interest on the national debt would rise from $44 billion a year to $50 billion a year in five years. This is if we can believe the interest rate projections in this budget. That $50 billion in interest is $10 billion more than we spend on national defence.
The budget includes $84 billion in new tax credits for businesses over the next five years. The Liberals project that inflation will be 3.5% in 2023 and roughly 2.1% thereafter. For this to happen, inflation would need to drop from 5.5% now to 2% in July and stay there for the next five years. This is not likely. The $3.1 trillion in spending, with massive deficits, would pour gasoline on the inflation fire. Therefore, these projected inflation rates are ridiculous.
In the last year of the Conservative government, federal government spending was $280 billion, with a $1.9-billion surplus. This year, the budget projects $456 billion in spending. That is up $176 billion, or 63%, since the Liberals took office. The fiscal framework projects the government spending to be $543 billion. This is if there is no further spending in the rest of their term. That is $263 billion more than in 2015, representing a 94% increase in spending. The increase alone is almost as much as the entire 2015 budget. Taxes have risen by $282 billion since 2015. We know it is not a revenue problem, because revenue has gone up by 92%.
At the end of the bill's plan, Pierre Trudeau and the son, the current Liberal leader, will have contributed $1.1 trillion to Canada's national debt. Pierre Trudeau always spent more than he promised. After eight years of the Liberals, the son has done the same. Promises were made, and promises were broken. Canadians simply cannot afford any more Trudeaus.
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- May/30/22 8:14:24 p.m.
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Madam Chair, under the current government, the science budget for the fisheries side of DFO, which is the side that deals with stock management, has declined by 3%, while the environmental ocean side has seen its science budget increase by 65%
Is this why 80% of stocks in the critical zone do not have a recovery plan?
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- Apr/28/22 4:09:03 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, my question is with regard to small craft harbours. For some reason, the fall economic statement and the current budget contain zero new money for small craft harbours. Small craft harbours are in desperate shape. There are over 10,000 of them in Canada, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans estimates that it will take almost $700 million just to bring the small craft harbours in southwest Nova Scotia up to operational standards.
I would ask the Deputy Prime Minister this: Why is the government not including any new money for small craft harbours?
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