Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Honourable senators, let me see if I can spend the next 30 or 35 minutes convincing you to vote the right way on Bill C-47 — we haven’t had too much success today. I have been encouraged by members opposite to see if I can finish before six o’clock. I think we should get pretty close.

It’s a dark day, colleagues.

It was March 22, 2016, when then-Finance Minister Morneau stood up in the House of Commons to deliver the first Liberal budget under Justin Trudeau’s government. With the 269‑page budget document on his desk entitled “Growing the Middle Class,” the Minister of Finance proudly announced the following:

Today, we begin to restore hope for the middle class. Today, we begin to revitalize the economy. Today, we begin a long‑term plan that will use smart investments and an unwavering belief that progress is possible to ensure that Canada’s best days lie ahead.

That first budget was followed by a second in 2017. This was Canada’s one-hundred-fiftieth birthday, and the Liberals were giddy with excitement — not yet realizing that their fantasy of restoring prosperity by running a series of deficits of $10 billion a year was nothing more than a pipe dream. The 2017 budget, colleagues, was entitled “Building a Strong Middle Class.” And once again, Minister Morneau stood up in the House of Commons and boldly declared that his government had:

. . . put together a plan to ensure that, in a changing world, Canada’s middle class and those working hard to join it can — and will — succeed.

This charade would continue with the 2018 budget which was called “Equality and Growth for a Strong Middle Class.” Then again in 2019 with a budget entitled “Investing in the Middle Class.” For Budget 2021, it was “A Recovery Plan for Jobs, Growth, and Resilience.” Budget 2022 was “A Plan to Grow Our Economy and Make Life More Affordable.” And before us today, we have a budget implementation bill for Budget 2023 entitled “A Made-in-Canada Plan: Strong Middle Class, Affordable Economy, Healthy Future.”

Colleagues, this government reminds me of — and I have used this analogy in the chamber before, and many of us are old enough to remember — the old record players when you put the needle down and they start scratching and skipping. Now, “skipping” might be the wrong word, because they actually became stuck in the same spot, going around and around, repeating the same line over and over again until you either threw something at the record player or you got up and fixed it.

This is where we are today, colleagues: The needle is skipping. And while the Prime Minister’s mouth never stops moving, the message no longer makes any sense. Colleagues, the truth of the matter is that there are certainly people who have done well under this Liberal government, but the middle class is not among them.

After eight years of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, everything feels broken: Inflation is crippling the middle and lower class; groceries are becoming unaffordable for more and more Canadians; the levels of indebtedness of the federal government and individual Canadians are unprecedented; interest rates keep rising; housing prices, be it for a house or an apartment, have become unaffordable. The federal public service has never been bigger and has never been as ineffective.

I am sure that a majority of senators think that I am exaggerating — I wish I was — but the facts tell a different story, colleagues. For those of you who still think that things are rosy in Justin Trudeau’s Canada, let me give you a few of those facts.

Let’s talk about inflation. On March 28, the government’s Budget 2023 press release trumpeted that they were “Making Life More Affordable.” This, my friends, is what it looks like to live in a fantasy land. Perhaps life is more affordable for Justin Trudeau and his elite friends, but that is not the experience of ordinary Canadians. By every objective measure, the Liberal war on work is making life more expensive for hard-working Canadians. Under Justin Trudeau, the inflation rate in Canada has reached levels not seen in 40 years.

The last time it was this bad, colleagues, was when there was a different Trudeau managing the finances of the country — imagine that. This is especially true for groceries. The price increases were supposed to be temporary, but not only are they not coming down, they keep going up.

The Angus Reid Institute noted just a couple of weeks ago that more than half of British Columbians are struggling to make ends meet due to inflation. Angus Reid Institute President Shachi Kurl told Global News on June 5 that:

. . . 53 per cent of them say they are either struggling or uncomfortable in terms of their ability to meet their daily costs . . . .

Canada’s Food Price Report 2023 is telling consumers to expect those prices to continue to rise this year with the most substantial increases expected in vegetables, dairy and meat. The report is predicting that an average family of four will spend up to $16,288 on food this year, an increase of over $1,000 from last year.

In case you are not familiar with the annual Canada’s Food Price Report, I would point out that it is not some creation of Conservative Party opposition research. It is an annual collaboration between research partners Dalhousie University, the University of Guelph, the University of Saskatchewan and the University of British Columbia — hardly bastions of Conservatives at those universities.

This research team uses historical data sources, machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics tools developed over many years to make predictions about Canadian food prices. In other words, don’t dismiss their findings when they say prices are going up and that, “We haven’t seen food prices increase this high in Canada for over 40 years . . . .”

Honourable senators, we see the reality of the impact of rising food prices when we hear that 1.5 million Canadians are resorting to food banks, and one in five people are skipping meals because they simply cannot afford the cost of food.

During the COVID crisis, Pierre Poilievre kept reminding the government that you cannot inject hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy and not have inflation as a consequence. Trudeau and his ministers answered that there would be no inflation. Some of their supporters were even warning us against deflation. The fact is — although it pains them to admit it — Pierre Poilievre was right, and the Liberals and those so-called experts were wrong.

When the inflation rate reached the current historic levels, the Liberals told us that we had to blame world inflation and problems in supply chains. As usual, when something goes wrong in Canada, Liberals are telling us that it is not their fault. They are only bystanders in Ottawa. Well, the truth is out. The large part of inflation in Canada is due to the spending by the Trudeau government and the reckless deficits.

John Cochrane and Jon Hartley from Stanford University said:

The most important source of Canada’s inflation is simple: Starting in 2020, the government borrowed more than $700‑billion, and mostly handed it out. People spent it, driving up prices.

Before tabling the budget, Chrystia Freeland admitted that Liberal deficits were causing inflation. She said that the goal of her budget, however, was, “. . . not to pour fuel on the fire of inflation.” She told us she would exercise fiscal restraint, but then the Liberals dumped another $60 billion of additional fuel on the fire.

John Manley, a former Liberal finance minister, said that Trudeau’s fiscal policy is making it harder to contain inflation. Manley described it as:

. . . a bit like driving your car with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake generally, especially if there’s slushy conditions under your tires . . . .

But the worst news is that this inflation may be here for a long time. The Bank of Canada indicated this month that the momentum in demand had increased the odds that inflation could get stuck above 2%, and noted that the neutral rate of interest may be higher than was previously believed.

Honourable senators, we were told that inflation was not supposed to happen. When it happened, it was supposed to be for just a short while. Now we know it is not only here, but it is here for a long time. Justin Trudeau and his government do not have any answers. They are just making the problem worse, which brings me to the issue of the debt.

Since 2015, the Trudeau Liberals have spent at least $500 billion that they don’t have. The Prime Minister promised modest and temporary deficits in 2015, saying that budgets balance themselves. I can’t say he lied — no, I’ll say he lied. Canada’s federal debt for the 2023-24 fiscal year is projected to reach $1.22 trillion. That is nearly $81,000 per household.

Justin Trudeau has added more debt than all other prime ministers combined and still has no plan to balance the budget. He and Minister Freeland have been asked hundreds of times: When will we have a balanced budget? They have no clue. Interest charges on the national debt will cost $43.9 billion this year. It represents a $19.5 billion increase from the pre-pandemic rate of $24.4 billion, an 80% increase.

During the COVID crisis, Justin Trudeau told us that the federal government was borrowing all that money so that ordinary Canadians did not have to. Well, first of all, when the federal government borrows money, it is ordinary Canadians who are borrowing it.

Earlier this month, the rating credit agency TransUnion reported that the combined debt of Canadian individuals has reached a new record: $2,320 billion. Canadian households are now more in debt than those in any other G7 country at 185% of disposable income, and the amount they owe is now more than the value of the country’s entire economy.

The International Monetary Fund issued a warning a few weeks ago: Canada runs the highest risk of mortgage defaults among advanced economies. According to Equifax, Canadians’ credit card spending was found to be 21.5% higher than the levels before the pandemic. Equifax wrote:

In Q1, 175,000 more consumers missed payments on at least one non-mortgage product, representing an 18.8 per cent increase from the first quarter of 2022.

Twenty-seven per cent of Canadians have said that they have had to borrow money from friends or relatives, take on additional debt or use credit cards to meet day-to-day expenses. Numbers from Statistics Canada show that insolvencies are up almost 20% over the last fiscal year, and to make matters worse, a report by RBC notes that these insolvencies could rise by nearly 30% over the next few years.

A couple of weeks ago, Angus Reid found 68% of Canadians say their debt is a source of stress for them, while among mortgage holders, 81% report debt as a source of stress. The poll shows almost 50% say they are in worse shape financially than they were last June — and that was before the latest rate hike. These levels of indebtedness are particularly scary when you see interest rising. In fact, 57% of Canadians said that if interest rates go up, they will be in financial trouble.

On June 7, the Bank of Canada raised its benchmark interest rate to 4.75% — the highest it’s been since May 2001 — making everything from mortgages to credit lines more expensive

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said that the increase in interest rates would see “a lot of people struggling” to pay their mortgages. She said the following:

There are a lot of anxious Canadians right now who will be concerned when they see this step taken by the Bank of Canada. This is entirely understandable. I absolutely understand that anxiety.

Variable rate borrowers will feel the pain first.

A homeowner who put 10% down on a $716,083 home — the average price in Canada in April — with a five-year variable rate of 5.55% amortized over 25 years, will pay $98 more per month, or $1,176 per year, on their mortgage payments after the latest 25-basis-point rate increase.

It’s no wonder that 64% of Canadians say higher interest rates are having a negative, or somewhat negative, impact on their personal spending, according to a Nanos Research survey done this month.

Honourable senators, it is not only mortgage holders, or other people with debt, who will suffer from the increase in interest rates; all taxpayers will.

As I said earlier, the federal government debt servicing charges for the current fiscal year is estimated to be $43.9 billion. That is money which is no longer available for priorities, such as helping more Canadians, as well as properly funding our health care system or our Canadian Armed Forces.

With $1.2 trillion of debt, any increase of 25 basis points in the interest rate on the government borrowing means a $3-billion increase in debt servicing costs.

After eight years of Justin Trudeau, we are looking at the potential of a large credit crisis if rates do not come down soon or, worse, keep climbing. And what is Trudeau’s government doing? They are doing nothing.

On the contrary, they are pouring gas on the fire with increased spending. A report from the CIBC released this month put it clearly:

Reining in government spending could take some of the pressure off the Bank of Canada in tamping down inflation and help limit pain for debt-ridden Canadians.

Speaking of a problem that the Trudeau policies are making worse, let me focus on housing.

Since Justin Trudeau promised to make life more affordable for the middle class in 2015, housing costs have doubled in Canada.

Colleagues, look at these numbers under Justin Trudeau: The down payment needed to buy a house has doubled from $22,000 to $45,000; mortgage payments for a new house have more than doubled from $1,400 a month to $3,100 a month; and rent in Canada has doubled from $1,172 to $2,153 for a two-bedroom apartment — and it has more than doubled in many of Canada’s largest cities.

In 2015, Canadians spent 39% of their paycheque on their monthly housing payments. Under Justin Trudeau, this has risen to 62%.

In June 2023, before the latest interest rate increase, Angus Reid Institute found that 54% of renters and 45% of mortgage holders were finding their monthly payment for housing tough or very difficult to manage.

These prices are taking whole swaths of the Canadian population out of the market for a house.

A recently published report from the mortgage rate comparison site Ratehub.ca suggests that those hoping to buy an average home in Vancouver need to earn about $231,950 a year just to meet the requirements to obtain a mortgage. That calculation includes the average home price in the Vancouver area of $1.2 million.

Terrible housing affordability is forcing adults aged 34 and younger to flee the cities in which they grew up, according to a report from Desjardins from May 2023. Younger Canadians are also putting off marriage and waiting longer to have children, according to the report.

Trudeau’s National Housing Strategy financed the construction of 106,000 homes since 2019. Yet, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, or CMHC, there is an estimated shortage of 400,000 homes per year, and builders are not meeting the demand.

In May 2022, the CMHC identified supply as “the biggest issue affecting housing affordability” in Canada, and that new housing starts have struggled to keep up with population growth in some of Canada’s large cities. To restore affordability, Canada will need an additional 3.5 million units by 2030 beyond those already in the works.

“Canada’s approach to housing supply needs to be rethought and done differently,” according to the CMHC’s deputy chief economist.

A June 2023 report from RBC Capital Markets included this ominous warning: “. . . fixing housing affordability, particularly in Toronto and Vancouver, is likely past the point of no return . . . .”

And yet, colleagues, in the middle of this crisis, the CMHC website opens with this statement: “. . . we are driven by one goal: housing affordability for all.”

You may as well change that headline to this: “We are totally and utterly failing under this Liberal government.”

It would be funny if this situation was not so dire. You would think the Trudeau Liberals would be putting pressure on the CMHC, and that heads would roll.

But don’t worry, colleagues; that is not the case. It is business as usual at the CMHC, with the top brass all receiving their performance bonuses, even if there is no performance. Again, the minister does nothing.

This statement from May 19, 2023, says it all:

Housing Minister Ahmed Hussen said builders need to construct more homes but did not introduce any new proposals to address the housing supply issue.

Again, the Liberals act like they are helpless witnesses of their own train wreck.

Speaking of train wrecks, it is the whole federal apparatus that is now dysfunctional after eight years of Justin Trudeau.

This is from The Globe and Mail on March 24:

Under the federal Liberal government, the size of the core public service has grown, and grown, over the past eight years. At the same time, it is increasing its reliance on contractors.

There is no single area with a bigger impact on spending: Personnel expenses consume half of Ottawa’s operating budget. And yet there has been little effort made to demonstrate whether this has improved program effectiveness.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer said that federal spending on personnel increased by almost 31% between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 fiscal years. The public service expanded by the equivalent of 31,227 full-time employees between April 2020 and March 2022.

I agree with Senator Gignac when he said — in his speech on Tuesday — that the increase in the number of employees in the federal bureaucracy and, more importantly, the increase in cost are both alarming.

Under Justin Trudeau, growth of the federal public service has outpaced that of local and provincial governments. Provincial governments have grown in part because of the need to hire more workers to relieve the pressure on long-term care and health care systems across the country, exacerbated by the pandemic. Ottawa can’t say the same thing, as it does not deliver those critical services.

If that’s not enough, the federal government’s reliance on contractors has also grown from $12.9 billion in fiscal years 2017-18 to a projected $21.4 billion this fiscal year. There is no plan to reduce the number of employees or the number of contractors.

Under the Trudeau Liberals, the federal government has grown exponentially. If Canadians could get top-notch service, that might be acceptable, but Canadians have been seeing a constant deterioration in the level of service from the federal bureaucracy. So more money is being spent for a lower quality of service. This is what Canadians have after eight long years of Justin Trudeau. No wonder everything feels broken — it is broken.

The truth is that we’ve barely begun to list everything. We could also add to Justin Trudeau’s legacy a 32% increase in violent crime; an opioid crisis that kills 22 people every day; a health system that is in shambles; an Armed Forces that can no longer fulfill its mandate; a Canada that is no longer relevant internationally; an Access to Information system that “. . . has steadily eroded to the point where it no longer serves its intended purpose” according to the information commissioner; an outdated and seemingly impossible to reform Employment Insurance system; a record number of homeless people in all Canadian cities; an international aid system stuck in the 20th century; the incapacity to give basic services to veterans; several thousand Indigenous people who live in Third World conditions; an Immigration Department in shambles, not able to issue visas and permits in a timely manner and facing accusations of racism and discrimination; transport and other infrastructure that is crumbling; and a public safety apparatus in such a state that the public is anything but safe.

The incompetence of this government knows no bounds. We have come to a point where it is difficult to decide which member of the Trudeau government was the most incompetent this year — although you have to say that Marco Mendicino is doing his best to win the top prize. I could go on and on, and don’t get me started on all the scandals and the odour of corruption surrounding this government.

I know I have unlimited time here, but I’m afraid I would not even have enough time to cover them all.

The captain of this drifting ship is, of course, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who reached new heights of incompetence this year — or maybe it’s new lows. He can’t give a straight answer on anything, especially about Beijing’s interference — because he benefited. He’s giving Canadians a second carbon tax on Canada Day of all things when we have record food bank usage.

He hid behind President Biden’s visit to finally confess that it was him who stayed in the $6,000-a-night hotel room in London last fall. And we learned yesterday that he and his entourage charged over $61,000 just for hotel rooms to attend — get this — an anti-poverty summit. The phrase “Let them eat cake” comes to mind.

In February, the former ethics commissioner said the entire Trudeau cabinet needs ethics training. One hopes the Prime Minister took him up on that so that Canadians are not going to suffer through more of this behaviour this fall.

With a record like that, it is no wonder why 80% of Canadians want a new government. And with Canada in such a dire situation, you would have thought that the government would come up with a serious budget to address the problems we are facing.

This is what Minister Freeland said on March 8, just before tabling the budget:

I am very conscious that we’re putting together this budget at a time of meaningful fiscal constraint and that fiscal constraint is exacerbated by the fact that the Canadian economy is slowing.

Did the Liberals come up with a budget and a budget implementation act that will address all those challenges? Of course, they didn’t. They went for the easy little measures, the gimmicks, like a “grocery rebate” that is not a rebate and has nothing to do with groceries.

In Justin Trudeau’s Canada, it is not the Department of Finance that leads the preparation of the budget. It is the communications department of the Prime Minister’s Office.

Do you think I’m exaggerating? Former federal finance minister Bill Morneau himself said that Justin Trudeau and his top advisors in his office favour scoring political points over policy rationales, leading to him feeling like a rubber stamp — similar to what we feel here many days with this government.

Let me quote from Mr. Morneau in his latest book:

My job of providing counsel and direction where fiscal matters were concerned had deteriorated into serving as something between a figurehead and a rubber stamp.

This is the former finance minister.

I would be curious to have an exit interview with Michael Sabia, the departed deputy minister of finance. I have no doubt that the urge he felt to go back to Montreal was fuelled by the fact that Justin Trudeau and Katie Telford are focused on managing the message instead of managing the country.

Because the communications department of the Prime Minister’s Office could not come up with the right slogan following their focus groups, the budget implementation act contains nothing concrete about how the government plans to manage the economy. What is the plan on inflation? When is the budget going to be balanced? When will the obese public sector go on a diet? How do you address the challenges Canadians face? Justin Trudeau and company have no clue.

Budgets are about deciding where to spend and, just as important, colleagues, where not to spend. The biggest fiscal failure of the Trudeau Liberals has been their insistence on ignoring this basic tenet of sound finance and, instead, layering new spending on old each year, while blithely ignoring the mounting pressure of the national debt. Instead of addressing the very real challenges facing Canadians today, this government insists on making them worse with this budget implementation act.

I will not go into the details of Bill C-47. Several senators have outlined the flaws of this bill — why it will not only do nothing to solve the problems we face but only make them worse. Let me, however, highlight some issues this bill and the overall fiscal policy of the Trudeau Government raise.

As I said, the Trudeau Liberals are adding over $60 billion in new spending, which translates to a staggering $4,200 per family. This means more inflation, more taxes and higher costs for hard-working Canadians who are already struggling to make ends meet.

The federal government’s spending spree has been nothing short of alarming. From fiscal year 2019-20 to 2020-21, federal spending skyrocketed by a staggering 73%, ballooning from $363 billion to a mind-boggling $639 billion.

If this had just been a one-off due to the pandemic, perhaps we could rest easier at night, but this was by a government that was already addicted to overspending. Before you excuse this government’s track record of burning through taxpayers’ dollars because of the pandemic, you should consider that there is no COVID spending in this year’s budget and yet the federal government’s spending is still 37% higher compared to pre‑pandemic levels. This works out to an average annual increase in spending of about 12%, which is simply unsustainable.

However, it doesn’t stop there. In fact, this government has no plan to get spending under control. Spending is expected to reach $556 billion by 2027-28 — almost back to COVID spending levels, but without the COVID. God forbid we should see another pandemic.

To make matters worse, this uncontrolled surge in spending has been funded by deficits, leading to a dramatic increase in federal net debt from $813 billion in 2019-20 to a staggering $1.3 trillion by 2022-23.

By 2027-28, Ottawa’s debt is anticipated to surpass $1.4 trillion. Thank God we have an election coming before then, and Pierre Poilievre and company will do their best to bring this back into reason.

Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Honourable senators, you all know I don’t like making long speeches, so I will be brief.

I’m not quite as enthusiastic about some of the legislation that we passed as my colleague Senator Gold is, but nevertheless, I believe we have done our job as an official opposition, and I am proud of that. I am certainly proud of my team and all of my colleagues for the tremendous work they have done. Our group is getting smaller, but our spirit and our heart are big, so we will continue to do that.

First, I want to wish all of you a wonderful, relaxing summer. Have an enjoyable time. I’m not going to list all the ones Senator Gold did, because he already did. I will just say to all of those whom he mentioned, “me too.”

However, I will say to Senator Gold, Senator Saint-Germain, Senator Cordy and Senator Tannas that it’s a pleasure — most of the time — working with all of you. I do agree with Senator Gold that we have had a lot of good meetings, and in politics, you simply don’t win all the battles. You try to win the war. We will continue to do that to the best of our ability.

I want to thank the staff in my office and the staff in all of the senators’ offices.

I also want to wish each and every senator a great summer. As I have said many times before, I am an opinionated person. I have my opinions, but I want everybody to know that I fully respect everybody else’s opinions in this chamber. It’s great that we can have the conversations that we have. We can vote in our democracy as we see fit or as we have been whipped to do. Nevertheless, there have been some challenges, but I’m looking forward to better days.

I want to truly wish everybody a great, relaxing summer. I know we’re not allowed to use props, but I can get away with it before the Speaker cuts me off. Senator Gignac, I will use these this weekend. Thank you very much. To all of my other colleagues, God bless. Have a great summer. Thank you.