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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 208

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 7, 2023 02:00PM
Context: House Hansard - 208 - Jun/7/23
Right Hon. Justin Trudeau (Prime Minister, Lib.)
  • Jun/7/23 3:18:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, once again, never letting the facts get in the way of a good political argument is the Leader of the Opposition's modus operandi. He says that if we were to raise child care fees in Canada instead of cutting them in half, if we were to not deliver dental care for young kids across this country, then, suddenly, inflation, which is impacting the world all over, would drop, that Canada is so important in the world that our lowest deficits in the GDP are contributing massively to this global inflation context. It is complete garbage from the Leader of the Opposition.
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Context: House Hansard - 208 - Jun/7/23
Hon. Pierre Poilievre
  • Jun/7/23 8:27:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I think we can all agree that if the member from Kingston is our role model, that is a good reason why we are in so much trouble today. This spending that has led to the inflation was utterly predictable, but its consequences have been utterly devastating. It is obvious by looking at the lineups at food banks across the country, which, in many cases, actually go many blocks down the street and around the corner. There are the cases of the young people who now estimate that they will be in their fifties before they will be able to move out of their parents' homes. These are not anecdotes. Just the other day, one prominent financial institution estimated that if a family was earning a quarter of a million dollars, it would take them 25 years in Toronto to save up for a down payment. It used to be that 25 years was the term it took to pay down a mortgage, now it takes that long just to get a mortgage, which illustrates the immense contortion that our economy has suffered. This is not without notice around the world. The IMF now says that Canada has the economy that is most at risk of default crisis out of all the countries in the advanced and developed world. Right now, household debt is 107% of GDP, which is to say that the combined debt of Canadian families is 7% bigger than the entire GDP of our country, and we have the worst household debt of any G7 country. This debt was not an accident. When governments create cash, they are sloppy about it. They do not simply print the money and hand it over to the Prime Minister to spend, although I think he might prefer that kind of efficiency, rather they have a central bank purchase government bonds on what is called the “secondary market”. In other words, the government sells the bonds to the financial institutions and the central bank buys them back. This creates an artificial private-sector demand for government debt, which makes it very easy for government to borrow money. After all, if I say to members that I will sell them a bond today for $1.00 and buy it back tomorrow for a $1.10, it is pretty easy to imagine that members would accept that transaction so that they could arbitrage the 10¢ profit on the back and forth. This allows government to spend cash very easily and it also increases the money supply. It balloons government and the financial industries. It is why, when the Federal Reserve is engaged in this practice of so-called quantitative easing, it has been wildly popular in both Washington and on Wall Street among Democrats who like big government and among Republicans who like big banks, because both of them actually profit when government creates cash to inflate financial assets and to inflate the spending capacity of itself. Therefore, what ends up happening is that those who benefit off government expenditures profit, those who benefit off the financial sector profit—
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