SoVote

May/7/24 11:45:58 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there is so much in this budget, and in previous budgets, that is building toward a new energy future. In my community of Yukon, we are investing in the critical minerals that will drive our move toward green energy and a green future and also stimulate and revive the economy for all Canadians.

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Context: House Hansard - 310 - May/7/24

Mr. Dan Albas (Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC)

May/7/24 11:50:26 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise on behalf of the good people of Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola. I will inform the House that I will be splitting my time with the incredible member of Parliament for Prince Albert. I have been around this place long enough to see a clear pattern of what a Liberal budget is. What exactly is the pattern of a Liberal budget? We have to go back to 2015 for a moment. What happened back in 2015? The Liberal Prime Minister promised three years of modest deficit-spending budgets before he made a cast in stone promise to return to a balanced budget in 2019. What happened to that promise? In each of those three years, the Prime Minister spent much more than he had promised. In 2019, he did not even try to keep his cast in stone promise about returning Canada to a balanced budget. In other words, this Liberal Prime Minister did not even try to do what he had promised. Why even promise to return Canada to a balanced budget when he had no intention of ever doing so? Of course, we all know the answer. The Prime Minister is willing to say literally anything if he thinks it will get him votes and help him gain voters' confidence. That is the real problem with what has become the trend in the libertarian budgets tabled by the Liberals and the Prime Minister, because Canadians have lost confidence in this Liberal government. Let me provide yet another example of this. To do this, we have to go back to the 2022 Liberal budget. Back in 2022, following the pandemic, the Prime Minister and his finance minister introduced what his Liberal government called the return to fiscal responsibility budget. That begs the question of what fiscally responsible spending was, according to the Liberal government in 2022. The answer is that the Liberals' 2022 budget proposed total federal government spending of $434 billion. This is an interesting amount of money because it represented a $90-billion spending increase over the Liberals' very own prepandemic spending in the 2019-20 fiscal year, which had a budget of $338 billion. Now, here we are with the latest Liberal 2024 budget, which proposes total spending of $535 billion for the 2024-25 fiscal year. Let us pause for a moment to recap. The 2022 return to fiscal responsibility budget was $434 billion. Now, here we are in 2024 with the current budget, and the proposed spending is $535 billion. This means that the latest Liberal budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year proposes to spend $100 billion more than what the Liberals themselves labelled a return to fiscal responsibility budget just a short time ago. Let us look at the bigger picture for a moment. Before the pandemic began, in 2019-20, the Liberals were spending $338 billion. Today, the Liberals now propose to spend $535 billion. That is an increase of almost $200 billion a year in annual spending, and let us not kid ourselves. Everyone knows the Liberals will spend more than the $535 billion they are proposing in this budget. If anyone is in doubt of that, I will recall what the finance minister told us in April of last year during her 2023 budget. In that 2023 budget, the Liberals told us that projected total spending would be $497 billion in 2023-24. That self-same Liberal budget projected spending would reach $556 billion in 2027-28. Now, here we are in 2024-25, and already the Liberals are proposing to spend $535 billion. Can we all not see the clear pattern here? Every year, what we are told will happen never actually happens. The forecasts, the promises and everything the Liberals promise us end up being completely false. They do not even try to live within the fiscal limits they propose for themselves. This particular Liberal budget follows the pattern that once again demonstrates that every commitment of a so-called fiscal guardrail made in previous Liberal budgets was a sham. Most offensive of all is that the Prime Minister's Office has the audacity to label this budget as the “Fairness for Every Generation” budget. I am literally aghast by this. The 2024 “Fairness for Every Generation” budget proposes a $40-billion deficit for this fiscal year alone. This is noteworthy because the Liberals' previous debt forecast was $35 billion for 2024-25 and $27 billion for 2025-26. In the Liberals' mini budget last fall, their fiscal update increased the deficits projected for 2024-25 and 2025-26 to $38 billion and $38 billion respectively. Now, why is this new debt significant? Given the current interest rates, the cost of servicing on the national debt has now exceeded federal spending on health care, and this problem only gets worse. There is an entire generation of young Canadians who are now entirely left out despite all the Liberal spending, and this is today. Literally, this problem is so bad that even the Prime Minister himself now openly admits that young people now feel like they cannot get ahead in the same way their parents or their grandparents could. However, it is much worse than that. The Prime Minister is leaving future generations of Canadians with record levels of debt and no plan whatsoever to return to a balanced budget, ever. The Prime Minister has failed in every single budget to do what he promised he would do in the budget the year previous, and I have established that with several examples in my comments today. Let us ask the Prime Minister, who thinks he is pretty awesome, if, in the past nine years he has massively and completely failed to even come close to balancing the budget, what is he expecting future generations of Canadians to do because they are the ones who will be inheriting all of this Liberal debt? What Canadians see is a desperate Prime Minister's Office trying to shovel as much money out the door as quickly and as recklessly as they can as they are hoping that something, anything, will stick as they try desperately to buy their way to remain in power because power is the one thing that the Prime Minister and his group of insiders really care about. I would submit that they will and, in fact, they are, willing to spend any amount of money in their quest to retain power. I believe the way they see it in the Prime Minister's Office is that this ends in one of two different ways for them. Either they will be successful and remain in power or, if they are unsuccessful, well, they do not care about the fiscal mess they will leave behind because it will be future generations of Canadians, but more importantly not them, who will have to clean the mess up and pay for it. I submit that this is really what is occurring here. Members can imagine leaving our kids behind a prepaid Visa, but in reality, that prepaid Visa card has a negative balance of $10,000 owing on it. The joke is on them. In the real world, no one would actually do that, but the Prime Minister is doing exactly that, and he has the audacity to pretend to call it fairness for every generation. There is nothing fair about racking up huge debts in an attempt to buy votes and leaving future Canadians to foot the bill. It is the most unfair thing that the government can do to young Canadians, but that is precisely what the Liberal government is doing. Rather than accept and respect the fact that many Canadians see and oppose what the government is doing, the Prime Minister's Office is doubling down and proposing more of the same. This is a budget, yes, but it follows a dangerous pattern. The Liberals continue to say whatever it takes to stay in power. They have no intention of following through on their promises. They do not care. They just care about power. That is not good enough for this chamber. It is definitely not good enough for Canadians, and I will not be going along with this plan to again spend whatever it takes, to throw that money at the wall, to see how long they can stay in power.

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Context: House Hansard - 310 - May/7/24

Mr. Eric Duncan (Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, CPC)

May/7/24 1:39:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it turns out that budgets do not balance themselves. After nine years of the Prime Minister and the NDP-Liberal government, they are zero for nine, as they are not even coming close to balancing the books here in Ottawa. Not only has the government not balanced the budget at all, but it has also doubled our national debt to $1.3 trillion and counting, with $43 billion alone being added in the deficit to our national debt this year. That is in just one fiscal year. The budget is big, a document that is a couple of inches thick. One can go back to look at the charts to see if the Liberals ever plan to balance the budget. The answer is no. There is no date, no year and no circumstance that the Liberals and NDP have proposed to balance the budget. The worst part is that there are tons of broken promises that they have made, which they have yet to fulfill, that will only result in more spending, driving our deficit up even further in this country. This is important in talking about the budget because balanced budgets have been a part of the common-sense Canadian consensus in this country for generations, for nearly the entire history of our country. There has been an idea that deficits are the exception, not the norm. Deficits were timely, targeted and temporary. Previous Liberal and Conservative governments, for the most part, over the years, followed that line of thought. Instead, we now have permanent and painful deficits hurting our country year after year, with no end in sight. Back in the day, when I was a mayor in rural eastern Ontario, the same principle and expression applied. It was easy to tell people what we would spend money on. The hard part was how to pay for it. What we see here are never-ending deficits, with budgets that do not balance, along with endless tax hikes, whether it is the carbon tax, being the main point, the excise tax or numerous other examples of the Liberals and NDP being more than happy to add to the tax burden, particularly at a time when Canadians can least afford it. After nine years, they still use the same tired lines when it comes to their budgets. They say the wealthy will pay, that the rich will pay for all these new things. After nine years, they are still not getting that average Canadians are moderate to low-income families that are struggling to get by. They are seeing the carbon tax and the excise tax being added for them, for example, and they are seeing the value of their paycheques becoming less and less powerful the longer and longer the Prime Minister remains. Deficits matter as well because they require money printing. This is half a trillion dollars by the Bank of Canada. The Prime Minister, in his nine years, has doubled our national debt, more than every other prime minister combined in our country's history. They are still not even close, being $40 billion off from getting the budget to be balanced. There is now more money being printed, and it is chasing fewer goods, which is resulting in record inflation that has not been seen in at least 40 years. The Prime Minister has said not to worry as interest rates are low and it is not a big deal. Again, all that extra money printing has led to inflation. Canadian households have been hurt very badly by this with skyrocketing mortgages and rents. Interest rates have been driven up by this out-of-control inflationary spending. Food prices are increasing continually at levels that are unsustainable. For the average Canadian in this country, at a time when the benchmark is that people should not be spending more than 30% of their household income on shelter, people are spending over double that. Over 60% of Canadian household income is now going just to putting a roof over their heads, before they buy food, put gas in their car or do anything else, just to make ends meet. Not only has all of this inflationary spending and the interest rates and mortgage rates that have increased hurt Canadian households, they have done a bad number on the finances of the federal government as well this year. Despite the financing of all this massive new debt with interest and mortgage rates all going up, the Prime Minister did not seem to think it was a big deal. The government planned to borrow the money when interest rates were low. Since rates have gone up, as all this borrowed money and refinancing has renewed, we have seen an astronomical increase in the interest on debt-servicing costs alone. We spent $54 billion, not to pay down the national debt in any way, but just to pay the interest on the $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion in national debt that we have. We spend more now on those interest payments than we do on health care transfers. We are giving money to bankers and bondholders, as opposed to more money to doctors, nurses, hospitals and long-term care. The solution is simple, and it is common sense. It is a dollar-for-dollar rule. Conservatives have said that for every new dollar of spending in a Conservative government, we would find a dollar of savings. That is not some wild, radical idea. Look no further than to the U.S. It was Bill Clinton, a Democrat, then president of the United States, and Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House of Representatives, who negotiated that deal. As a matter of fact, that same dollar-for-dollar rule was the last time the budget in the United States was balanced. It shows that it can be done here and, more important than anything, that we have to get our finances under control. After nine years of the Prime Minister, the more he spends, the worse it gets. The more he spends, the higher our debt, our deficits, our interest payments and the burden, not only today but also on future generations. I want to talk about the carbon tax. The carbon tax is the number one issue I hear in my travels throughout Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry and Cornwall. In this budget, the Liberals and the NDP keep their plan to be completely out of touch, extreme when it comes to their approach on the carbon tax. They are happy with where it is right now, which is about 18¢ a litre on the price of gas and 21¢ a litre on the price of diesel, and they want to quadruple it in the coming years, as part of their plan. Here is the quick summary of exactly how they are going to do that. They never come out and tell Canadians the way that it is going to be and that it is going to be 61¢. We have to piece it together as they try to do the shell game and hide all of it. There is carbon tax number one, and again, as we all know, farmers will be paying $1 billion on their natural gas and propane in the coming years, just on that, with no rebates. Trucking companies that ship food, goods and services get no rebates. Small businesses get no rebates. There is no confidence whatsoever. The Liberals have been talking for years about offering rebates, and they will continue. There is no detail and no plan to actually do that. At the end of the day, those rebates are phony, because the Parliamentary Budget Officer says that just on that first carbon tax, eight out of 10 families are going to be, or are, paying more in carbon tax. For example, an Ontario family is going to pay hundreds of dollars, $478, by the time we look at everything, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. That is the first carbon tax. The second carbon tax is a fuel standard that the Parliamentary Budget Officer says is going to add 17¢ a litre in the coming years. There are zero rebates for anyone, anywhere on that. If it is not out of touch enough to have carbon tax one at 37¢ and carbon tax two at 17¢, coming in, then how out of touch, tax hungry and tax-increase obsessed are the Liberals and the NDP if they are going to tax the tax? They are going to tax the tax by continuing to put the HST on all those other carbon tax increases to get to 61¢ a litre. I got a letter recently from the Army, Navy and Air Force Club in Cornwall. Do members know who also does not get a rebate? Community halls and community centres. They sent me their natural gas bill for just one month this winter. The carbon tax and the HST on it was $275 of an $1,100 bill, just to service that. Those are halls, community centres and legions that are paying a carbon tax with zero rebates, further driving up their costs, for just a simple not-for-profit cause in our community. I want to address the NDP, as we always do, and the budget. If there was only something they could do about it. We hear them in question period. We hear them in the budget debate. They complain about all the terrible things the Liberals are not doing, saying that they promised something in the budget and that they never delivered. They talk tough. The leader of the NDP made a speech a couple of weeks ago, saying that he was not in favour of the carbon tax anymore. Then, he flip-flopped and said that he was again. He flip-flopped on his flip-flop, if members are keeping track. The NDP talk tough in question period. When the first vote on the budget was called here within the last week, once again, the NDP propped up the Liberals. There were no questions asked. It is just the way it is. It is time to call a carbon tax election so that Canadians can have their say on the future of this country. I have zero confidence, after nine years, in the Prime Minister to manage our country.

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