44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 18, 2023 10:00AM
- Apr/18/23 4:41:45 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House today to speak to the reckless budget brought down by the Liberals and supported unreservedly and unsurprisingly by the NDP.
In fact, the budget is truly a product of the office of the Leader of the NDP. I think it is fair to say that people underestimate him. Canadians now know that he is the one truly responsible for the government's budgetary decisions. We might even call him the right hon. member for Burnaby South.
It has to be a bit embarrassing for the Liberal members to sit in the House day after day and see their party being completely controlled by the NDP leader. They should not be surprised because since 2015, the Prime Minister and his ministers have demonstrated through their behaviour that their level of incompetence should have served as a warning.
For example, in 2013, the Prime Minister told anyone who would listen that he was not worried about budgets because, as he explained, budgets balance themselves. We know how that turned out.
After such a comment, we might have expected that many Liberal candidates would be reluctant to run under his leadership. No, on the contrary, they all took the same stance and eagerly repeated whatever he said.
That was certainly not the first time that the Prime Minister made odd and dangerous comments, but, for Canadians, that was certainly the most memorable one.
Some believed that although the Prime Minister was incompetent and did not have the experience required to steer the ship, at least he was surrounded by ministers and wise advisers who could tell him how to be sensible and would control his impulses. This hope quickly evaporated when his Minister of Finance increased our country's national debt to unprecedented levels. Yes, the Minister of Finance defended the federal government's record deficit of more than $381 billion arguing it was affordable, given the low interest rates.
I would like to say more about that, but I want to speak about what would be important to address in a budget, and that is my Bill C-325, which I recently introduced.
Bill C-325 would strengthen the conditional release system by creating a new offence for the breach of conditions, requiring parole officers to report breaches of conditions and restoring the former version of section 742.1 of the Criminal Code, which was repealed in 2022 by the Prime Minister's Bill C‑5.
The government's Bill C-5, which has passed, allows criminals convicted of aggravated sexual assault, for example, to serve their sentences in the community. I hope that this monumental error will be corrected, and that the Bloc Québécois and NDP members will support my bill.
These violent criminals should not be serving their sentences at home watching Netflix. They should be behind bars. The Bloc Québécois did support Bill C-5. They voted in favour of it, but after seeing what happened next, they realized that there were problems. Consider the case of Jonathan Gravel, a 42-year-old man who managed to avoid prison after committing a violent sexual assault. The Bloc Québécois now realizes that this needs to be reversed, because it just does not work.
Even a Crown prosecutor in Quebec, Alexis Dinelle, slammed the government for reopening the door to sentences served in the community for this type of crime. He said, and I quote, “Right now, [the Prime Minister] and [the Minister of Justice] probably have some explaining to do to victims of sexual assault. I cannot stay silent in the face of this regressive situation”.
What this federal law does is give men who have been convicted of aggravated sexual assault the possibility of serving their sentences at home. For example, according to La Presse, Sobhi Akra wants to be able to serve his sentence from home after pleading guilty to sexually assaulting eight women. That is outrageous.
My bill also proposes to create an offence for breach of conditions of conditional release by criminals who have been convicted of crimes such as sexual assault, murder or assaulting children, for example, and who fail to meet their parole conditions when they are on parole. Right now, it is not an offence for such criminals to violate the conditions of their parole.
For example, I am sure everyone remembers Eustachio Gallese, who murdered Marylène Levesque three years ago. One of his parole conditions involved being treated by a psychologist. However, he was not reincarcerated when the Parole Board learned that he was seeing prostitutes and violating the conditions of his parole. His release was not revoked and nowhere in his record does it indicate that he was failing to meet his parole conditions.
With my bill, people like Eustachio Gallese, who are out on parole, will no longer be able to make a mockery of our justice system and will have to take the conditions of their parole seriously. It will help save the lives of people like Marylène Levesque.
As we know, the main role of parliamentarians is to ensure the highest level of public safety for Canadians. We must correct the monumental error in the law stemming from Bill C‑5 and strengthen management of the parole system.
Let us get back to the budget.
Canada's finances and public funds are not toys for the Prime Minister and his rich friends to play with. Canadians have worked too hard and sacrificed too much to allow these people to destroy the quality of life of our future generations.
We know that the Minister of Finance studied at Harvard. We also know that this university does not teach these kinds of financial strategies to its students. Like the Prime Minister, the Minister of Finance clearly missed a lot of classes at university.
When the budget was tabled by the government, we heard different reactions. One came from Mario Dumont, a well-known commentator and former Quebec politician who hosts several shows in Quebec, on TVA. This was his initial reaction upon seeing the budget:
What is most shocking is that, during those months when the Canadian public service was growing by leaps and bounds, service delivery was the least efficient it had ever been. Need I remind anyone of the passport crisis? ...When you read the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report and compare it to what is happening on the ground, one conclusion is obvious. Canada is bloody badly managed. A private company that is so poorly managed would be sent to the slaughterhouse.
From what we can see, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance have no idea what sound financial practices are, and, with the support of the NDP leader, they are dragging this country into financial chaos. While the Prime Minister is destroying the country's finances, Liberal members on the other side of the House are sitting back and watching our children's future slip away. That is the Liberal legacy under this Prime Minister: a total failure to manage our country's finances that puts Canada's future in a very precarious position.
Our legacy will be to clean up this mess and restore sound fiscal policies for the good of our citizens, because when we talk about the future, we are talking about our children and grandchildren. We may tell ourselves that everything is fine right now, but when we look at the interest on the current debt, when we do the projections and calculations, we can see that we are talking about $21 billion in additional interest payments. It is not hard to see that this will become unsustainable over the next few years and the funds available for government operations will be subject to that interest. That means there will be less money and we cannot just keep borrowing, which will only make things worse.
That is why we on this side of the House will always seek to work in a reasonable way in order to maximize the public purse and strike a balance to ensure we do not end up in a situation where our grandchildren will pay the price later on.
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- Apr/18/23 4:52:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we know the Conservatives' position in terms of the budget, the cuts they would make if they were in power, major budgetary restrictions and balancing the budget. This evening, 150,000 federal public servants will quite likely go on strike.
I would like to ask my colleague from Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles the following. If he were the minister in such a situation, would he accept the federal public servants' salary conditions to avoid a strike?
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- Apr/18/23 4:55:40 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am sure that all of my colleagues will be delighted with the words I have chosen for my speech. I am sure they all want to hear it, as do the majority of Canadians. It is important to be able to repeat things that have been said here and to be able to listen to them carefully, because sometimes they come back to haunt us.
I am going to start with a quote from someone who said, “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. It will ensure that our finances remain sustainable.”
That sounds good. That is great. It seems serious. Who said that? It was not an analyst on television or an economist. It was the Minister of Finance. She did not say that a long, long time ago; she said it when presenting the 2022‑23 budget just a year ago. Let us look at this quote and analyze it a little to see what it means.
The first statement is, “let me be very clear. We are absolutely determined that our debt‑to‑GDP ratio must continue to decline”.
She was talking about the 2023 budget. One year later, has the minister demonstrated resolve? It seems not. According to the 2023‑24 budget, the debt‑to‑GDP ratio will increase from 42.4% to 43.5% in 2023‑24. It will also be greater than 42.4% in 2024‑25. In the two years since this statement was made, the Minister of Finance was unable to maintain her resolve not once, but twice, with regard to her fiscal anchor, which was to ensure that the debt‑to‑GDP ratio would continue to decline.
The facts presented in the budget are simple. Canada's federal debt for 2023‑24 is expected to reach $1.22 trillion. These are not numbers we are used to saying. One trillion is a thousand billion. When we talk about $1.22 trillion, that means 1,022 billion dollars. That is nearly $81,000 per Canadian household.
Canada's budgetary projections show no path to balance. The deficit for 2022‑23 is $43 billion. In 2023‑24, the deficit will reach $40.1 billion. The fall economic statement projected a surplus of $4.5 billion in 2027‑28. The 2023 budget projects nothing but deficits. The current projection is a $14‑billion deficit in 2027‑28. That was the year we were supposed to have a balanced budget, according to the Minister of Finance. As I was saying, she lacked resolve.
Let us continue with another sentence from this statement by the Minister of Finance. She said that the pandemic debt we incurred to keep Canadians safe and solvent must and will be paid down.
That is firm, clear and precise. I may have a quick lesson for the Minister of Finance. To pay down a debt, people have to start by paying it down. To pay it down, they have to stop borrowing money. To stop borrowing money, they have to stop adding new spending.
The reality of budget 2023‑24 is that public spending has again increased by more than $120 billion over pre-pandemic spending. In 2019, federal program spending was $323 billion. In 2023-24, expenditures will reach $447 billion. That is a far cry from paying back pandemic debt. We are spending even more money than we spent before the pandemic.
The budget makes no mention of paying down the pandemic debt. Things have certainly changed after just a year. The words “pay down” seem to have disappeared from the Minister of Finance's vocabulary, even though he had given us a bit of hope last year. Unfortunately, it seems that nature has resumed its course. It probably came galloping back following a meeting between the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister, the biggest spender in the history of Canada. Indeed, it is good to remember that the Prime Minister has accumulated more debt than all the other previous prime ministers of this country combined.
He has no plan for balancing the budget and bringing his inflationary deficits under control. Inflationary deficits are the reason behind the rising day-to-day costs of the goods we buy and the interest rates we pay.
I am going to read out another statement related to what I was talking about earlier, and this one really important. In the 2022 budget, when speaking about the debt-to-GDP ratio that I mentioned earlier, the Minister of Finance said that this was the fiscal anchor, the line that should not be crossed in order to ensure that our finances remain sustainable. We are in trouble.
As I said earlier, the Minister of Finance herself has crossed this uncrossable line twice, for both the coming year and the next year. She made it clear that exceeding the current debt-to-GDP ratio would make Canada's finances unsustainable. According to our own finance minister, the Prime Minister's debt and inflationary deficits keep rising.
In 2021-22, debt servicing costs were $24.5 billion. The Prime Minister's inflationary spending caused interest rates to climb, which increased the cost of debt servicing in Canada. Who is going to pay for all that? Not I, but rather our children and our children's children, in short, everyone will to some extent. Even today, the cost of repaying the debt is so high that we will no longer be able to pay for all the promises and all the spending that the government keeps adding.
In my opinion, the finance minister has lost all credibility because she probably abdicated her responsibility to ensure Canada's finances were viable, healthy and above all realistic for future generations. This is evident and has been demonstrated.
It is not too surprising because the Minister of Finance was probably following her Prime Minister's example. We have had the chance to talk about this several times since the beginning of the budget debate. In 2015, the Prime Minister was elected after making his grand promise to run small deficits, very small deficits. He promised to run a deficit of $10 billion the first year, $10 billion the second year, $6 billion or $7 billion the following year and then go back to a balanced budget. The Prime Minister made that promise in order to get elected, obviously. He said it because interest rates were low. He said that interest rates would never go up, that we were in a good period, that everything was going well and that we could afford to borrow money. That is not what happened in the least.
Let us not forget that the Prime Minister said that budgets balance themselves. The Minister of Finance probably thought that a return to a balanced budget would happen on its own. Unfortunately, the reality of the economic situation we are experiencing around the world caught up with her.
Here is the Prime Minister's latest and probably worst statement. In front of a group of young people, the Prime Minister tried to justify his propensity for borrowing by urging young people to use their credit cards at 19% interest to pay their rent and invest in their education. That was the Prime Minister's wise counsel to a group of young people who came to hear him speak. It is not surprising today that the finance minister has put us in a situation where our federal finances are no longer viable. The only way to fix the situation is to elect a responsible Conservative government in the next election.
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