- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles
- Quebec
- Voting Attendance: 64%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $115,195.70
- Government Page
- Apr/18/24 1:39:53 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, on the contrary, I would have liked to see the Prime Minister, when he was leader of the Liberal Party in 2015, fulfill his promise and spend his $10-billion deficits in the first and second years on infrastructure.
I would remind my colleague that it was Denis Lebel, a member of the Conservative government at the time, who announced the Champlain Bridge infrastructure project in Montreal, which cost $5 billion or $6 billion. It was the Conservatives who spearheaded that project, and we did a superb job.
We want infrastructure that respects taxpayers' wallets. We are criticizing the waste that goes who knows where.
108 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Apr/18/24 1:29:51 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, when I give a speech, I usually say that I am pleased to rise in the House to speak to a subject. Today, however, I cannot really say that I am pleased.
I would like to begin with a brief look back in time. The date is August 2, 2015, when the election was called. We learned in the weeks following the start of the election campaign that the Conservative government had left a budget surplus of $1 billion. The fiscal year ended with a surplus.
I have to admit that the Liberals are marketing masters. They are experts at this. They know how to play with people's emotions, with their minds. During the election campaign, the Prime Minister, who was then the leader of the Liberal Party, promised to run small $10‑billion deficits in the first and second years in order to invest heavily in Canadian infrastructure, and he promised to balance the budget in the third year.
Voters who heard that thought it might not be so crazy. Maybe he was right; maybe we did need to invest in infrastructure. They decided to give him a chance. Voters were entranced by that promise. Instead of making massive investments in infrastructure and running a $10‑billion deficit each year for the first two years, the government ran a $30‑billion deficit in the first year, and again in the next two years. Four years later, at the end of the first Liberal term, a $100‑billion deficit had been added to the debt.
In the very first year, after $30 billion in deficits, we checked in on the infrastructure situation. In the end, $3 billion of that $30 billion had been spent on infrastructure. That means that $27 billion disappeared into thin air. That happened every year for the next nine years. We are talking nine years of budget deficits. These are not small deficits, these are massive budgets. The country's debt has doubled and now stands at $1.2 trillion. That is $600 billion more than it was at the beginning of the Liberal government's mandate.
Since then, what has happened? Inflationary deficits have caused interest rates to rise. I get the feeling that people are not paying attention to the fact that this is putting social programs at risk. Yes, the federal government already had social programs. However, by running up deficits, it has run out of money. It is jeopardizing what was already there by creating other programs that are just ideas—nothing is functioning yet. It is not the federal government's role to create programs that interfere in provincial jurisdictions.
As I said, the Liberal marketing machine is on overdrive, releasing lots of pretty pictures and promising everyone the moon and the stars, but that is not what is really happening. Programs are being jeopardized. Organizations everywhere are struggling and are no longer getting any answers. People are calling us and saying that they do not know what to do because the funding they used to receive no longer exists. They do not know what to do, and they are not getting any answers. It is not complicated. They have no money left in the bank and no room on their line of credit. That is what happens when the government runs a massive deficit and pretends that it is helping people, when there is no money left to help them. This is an untenable situation.
As far as this year's budget is concerned, some will say that the opposition complains all the time, that it has nothing better to do. It is true that we have some criticisms, but they are justified. There is a lot to criticize here. As a matter of fact, that is our job. More importantly, experts, analysts, journalists who cover the economy, have all said right from the start that, once again, this defies common sense. When we talk about having common sense, that is in contrast to things that defy common sense. Again, this is a massive deficit budget for which there is no explanation. The Liberals are quite adept at this.
I cannot show it because we are not allowed to show anything in the House, but I have a brick in my hands, namely the budget. In reading it we see that there are some fine words and good intentions, but there is nothing meaningful. In the end, we see that there is more than $40 billion in inflationary spending, a $39.5-billion or $40-billion deficit and we are getting nothing for our money. If only there had been something meaningful.
Had the Liberals implemented something substantial in terms of infrastructure at the time when they promised to invest in it, then we could have said that their plan is working. However, instead, it seems as though the Liberals are wasting money and do not know where the money is going. That is fascinating but also unfortunate for Canadians.
Many people have been raising red flags for a long time, and I am not talking about the Conservatives. On the Liberal side of things, two weeks ago, the former Liberal governor of the Bank of Canada, David Dodge, said that this budget would be the worst budget since 1982. John Manley, a former Liberal finance minister, also said a few months ago, that by acting as it is doing, the government is pushing on the inflationary gas pedal. This way of spending and wasting money—money that, let us face it, is borrowed because it is being loaned to us by a bank—is driving up inflation and interest rates.
What is shocking is that this does not seem to bother the Prime Minister. We keep telling ourselves that, at some point, he will finally understand, get his act together and realize that his peaches and cream idea is not working and that he needs to regain control of the public purse, but no. The government is cozying up with the NDP and, too often, with our Bloc Québécois friends. It keeps spending and spending, and we have no idea where that money is going. That is not helping people.
Canadians are struggling more than ever. They cannot make ends meet. Everything costs more. Rent has doubled. A down payment on a mortgage to buy a house is double what it used to be. Young people cannot afford that. I have 20-year-old children. They look at that and tell themselves they will never be able to buy a house. There is no way. House prices have gone up. The amount people need for a down payment has gone up. The same goes for rent. A small two-bedroom apartment used to cost $1,000; now it is $2,000 or $2,200. This is not working.
Worse still, we now have to pay interest on nine years' worth of deficits, and that costs us $54.1 billion a year. That is as much as the budget for health transfers. Instead of sending that money to the provinces to help the health care system, the government is sending it directly to banks in London and New York. What good does that do us? None at all.
Worse still, Thomas Mulcair and others have said that $54.1 billion is the equivalent of all the GST we pay on our bills. If someone gets a restaurant bill that includes $13 in GST, they might wonder where that $13 will go and whether it will be spent on Canadians. Unfortunately, it will go to banks to pay off interest. All the GST collected from businesses and individuals will do nothing but pay interest on the debt.
No one is going to convince me that this makes any sense. No one is going to tell me that it is no big deal or, like the Liberals in defeat, that we are better off than other G7 countries. Are we really better off than other G7 countries? A typical single-family home in the United States costs half as much as it does here. Gasoline is cheaper. Everything is cheaper in the United States based on population. What are we being compared to? That is where it falls apart. The Liberals cannot get it through their heads that what needs to be looked at is daily life, the everyday lives of Canadians who work, pay taxes and realize that, when all is said and done, everything costs them more and they do not have the money to make ends meet.
Not everyone has the luxury of simply going to the bank to apply for a $50,000 loan with the intention of paying the interest when they have the money. That is not how it works in real life. The government should act like people do in real life and be cautious. That is what is so deplorable about this government. It is not careful with the public purse. Worse still, it keeps borrowing money and paying interest.
At the end of the day, we cannot support this bill. More than that, we will vote against it and consider that a vote of non-confidence, because it is over. We do not have confidence in this government. After nine years, we have more and more evidence of that.
1573 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Sep/20/23 2:35:52 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, I would like to know what the minister thinks of a former Liberal finance minister, John Manley, who said that the Prime Minister's deficits are like stepping on the gas when it comes to inflation. This forces the Bank of Canada to step harder on the brakes by increasing interest rates.
Here is an example of completely ridiculous spending. The government spent $284 million to redo Canadian passports. That is a third of a billion dollars, and it was $123 million over budget. That is an outrageous waste.
Will the Prime Minister promise to stop burning Canadians' money?
103 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Sep/18/23 3:02:57 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, does the Minister of Finance know that mortgage payments for an average home are now $3,560 a month? That represents a 151% increase since the Prime Minister took office.
In the Liberal ridings of Montreal, people need to earn at least $113,500 a year to even hope to buy a home. These increases are the direct result of this Liberal government's inflationary policies.
Will the government commit to stop running inflationary deficits so that home ownership is not just a dream?
86 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Apr/18/23 4:54:33 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, that is an excellent question. We remember very clearly that the Prime Minister did some marketing during the 2015 election campaign. He said that the Liberals would generate small $10-billion deficits in order to heavily invest in Canadian infrastructure.
However, during that government's first four years, it ran $100 billion in additional deficits. A few billion dollars were invested in infrastructure, because nothing was forthcoming. It was all smoke and mirrors. They said there would be small deficits to allow investments in infrastructure. No one can object to that. However, ultimately, $100 billion went up in smoke. That was the result after the first four years. Now, we are way past that point.
120 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, I am here to talk about the fall economic statement, which was presented last week.
For the past seven long years, the Liberals, with the shameful complicity of the NDP, have succeeded in breaking the spirit and morale of Canadians by making them poorer than they have ever been in the history of our country. When asked if I would like to share my thoughts on the fall economic statement, I did not think twice.
As members of Parliament, we are well positioned to see what is actually happening on the ground, and I wonder why the members opposite do not see how people are suffering, as we do on our side. When the Minister of Finance says that cancelling a Disney+ subscription is a good option to reduce the debt burden and make ends meet at the end of the month, it is clear that the Liberals are totally out of touch with reality.
I will give some examples. When the Liberals came to power in 2015, a litre of gas cost $1. Now, on average, it costs $1.67. This does not even take into account the increases that are expected in the new year, when this Prime Minister raises the carbon tax for a third time.
In 2015, the average price of a house in Canada was close to $300,000. Today, the average price of a house is over $746,000. This is 40% more expensive than in the United States. The Prime Minister has said he does not think about monetary policy all that much, and I have a feeling the Minister of Finance does not either. The economic update released by the Liberal-NDP coalition does not address the cost of living crisis created by government spending, which is out of control. The Prime Minister's inflationary deficits have driven up the price of groceries, gas and home heating. Canadians have never paid more in taxes than under this Prime Minister.
To reduce the cost of living in Canada, the Conservatives had two clear requirements. It was not complicated. First, we implored the government to not create any new taxes. We asked it to cancel all planned tax hikes and to not triple the carbon tax. Second, we warned the Liberals that they had to stop all new spending or ensure that any new spending was matched dollar for dollar in savings. In other words, to spend a dollar, they would have to save a dollar. What was so complicated about the Conservative Party's requests for this economic update? Nothing, it was just common sense.
I cannot show the document that I have with me, but we saw in this economic update that none of the Conservative Party's demands were met. For that reason, we cannot support this inflationary update.
The Liberals claim that they had no other choice than to double the debt. They have accumulated more debt than all previous prime ministers combined. Let us recall the 2015 election campaign. The Prime Minister, who was then the leader of the Liberal Party, said that the Liberals would have a small deficit of $10 billion the first year in office and another the second year. After that, they would balance the budget. They promised to make massive investments in the country's infrastructure.
It was a good marketing strategy. They promised to run up a deficit to invest money, and people thought that it might not be such a crazy idea. We all saw what happened. After their first four years in office, they had accumulated $100 billion in additional debt and no major infrastructure project had gotten off the ground in Canada. We fell for it from the beginning.
Then, the Prime Minister tried to make us believe that all of the spending in the past two years was related to the pandemic. However, today, we know that 40% of the new measures were not. We are talking about $205 billion. The Parliamentary Budget Officer did a study that showed that $300 billion of the $500 billion was used to implement pandemic-related measures. There again, we could look into all of that spending because there was no reason for some of it. Regardless, we know that, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer's assessment, $205 billion in spending had nothing to do with the pandemic. What is worse, we do not know what that money was used for. Half a trillion dollars was spent in two years on top of the government's usual spending.
How did we get into this mess? The inflation rate is so insanely high that interest rates had to be pushed up to control it. Meanwhile, ordinary people are being bled dry.
Additional costs are related to things such as houses and mortgages. People with variable mortgages get hit first. Every time the interest rate rises, their mortgage interest rate goes up. The principal does not change, but the interest rate jumps.
People who have to renew their mortgage these days will have to pay an average of $7,000 more in interest per year for an average family. That is a chunk of change.
Our friends across the way used to love talking about how they were working for the middle class and the people who wanted to be part of it. What we have seen in recent years is the opposite of that. They have made the middle class poorer, not richer, and people are ending up in financial trouble.
The Bank of Canada announced that it had no choice but to raise the interest rate in an attempt to fight inflation driven by inflationary measures. That will make things even worse for people.
There was nothing in the fall economic update suggesting the government plans to do anything to keep all that under control. The only thing on the agenda is taxes, taxes and more taxes. We have been talking about the carbon tax for two months now.
Yesterday, I was pleased to see a report by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which polled businesses across the country. One of the main conclusions is that the businesses confirm that the carbon tax is a major problem for transportation. All the costs associated with that are causing prices to go up and the consumer is left paying the bill. The CFIB is asking on behalf of its members to not increase the carbon tax. The Conservative Party is not making this up. Businesses across the country are saying that this absurd and that it needs to stop.
I am not even talking about food banks. Last month, there were 1.5 million visits to the country's food banks in just one month. That is a record number of food bank visits in the history of Canada.
I have endless examples, but the main thing I want people to remember from my remarks today is that ultimately, this economic update, which is about 100 pages long, simply repeats measures that were voted on last fall. There is nothing really new here. The Conservative Party's simple demands, which we know were backed by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, were not considered. Furthermore, the Parliamentary Budget Officer's assessments confirm what we are saying.
We are not making things up just so we can make speeches and blather on. We are stating economic realities that are easy to understand. Canadians who have to pay the bills at the end of the month understand this full well. They look to their government, which does not seem to get it. People are looking to their MPs and asking them what is going on and what they can do to help the economy make a smart recovery. That is our job.
The Conservatives are in opposition for now, but not for very long. We do not know how much longer we will be in opposition, but as long as we are, we will make sure Canadians know we are asking the right questions and making the right recommendations to the government to build a good, strong economy so that people can get up in the morning feeling happy to go to work and knowing they have enough money to treat themselves once in a while, not wondering if they will have enough money to pay the bills at the end of the month even though they have a job.
There was nothing new in the fall economic update. Nothing has changed, and that is very disappointing.
1431 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Oct/17/22 2:36:24 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, since 2015, the Liberals have increased the debt more than all other governments combined. In 2021, before interest rates went up, they spent $20.2 billion on debt servicing alone. Let us not forget that the Prime Minister and his Minister of Finance said that we could afford to run deficits because interest rates were low. We have seen what happened over the past year. Their excessive spending caused inflation, which has significantly increased the cost of living for Canadians.
When will the Prime Minister cancel his plan to triple the carbon tax, which is also increasing the cost of living?
104 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- menumenu
- notificationsnotifications
- home
- mailmail
- searchsearch
