Mario Beaulieu

“Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Cloverdale—Langley City. Today we are speaking about a motion before the House that is quite timely, because the Prime Minister’s government is projected to borrow $733 billion in five years. That is more than the total debt accumulated by every prime minister in Canadian history before Justin Trudeau. It is also more than the debt added during Prime Minister Trudeau’s ten years in government, years that included a once-in-a-century global pandemic. What took generations of prime ministers to accumulate, the current Prime Minister plans to borrow in just five years. This is an extraordinary pace of borrowing, and it is mortgaging our children’s future, but what do Canadians have to show for all this borrowing and all this spending? Our economic growth forecast has been downgraded to just 0.9% this year. We have a record 2.4 million visits at food banks in a single month, and one in three is for a child. Millions of Canadians are struggling to afford the most basic necessities. Meanwhile, the fastest-growing expense for the federal government is not defence, not infrastructure and not health care. It is interest on the national debt. How sad is that? There are billions of dollars that cannot be spent on health care, infrastructure or lowering taxes for hard-working Canadians. By 2030, the government is projected to spend approximately $83 billion a year just to service the national debt. What is the government’s plan to bring this under control? There is no plan. In fact, the Parliamentary Budget Officer projects that the federal debt-to-GDP ratio will rise over the next five years. That means that our debt burden is growing rather than shrinking, and it is in fact growing faster than our economy is growing. That is why we are calling on the Prime Minister to appear before the finance committee to answer a very simple question: What is his plan to reduce the deficit spending, bring debt interest under control, deliver tax relief for Canadians and bring the debt under control? Let me ask a question. What would we do if our household debt were spiralling out of control? Would we change the way we measure our debt? Would we start calling our everyday expenses investments? Would we move some of our borrowing onto another credit card and tell our family that our finances were improving? No, of course we would not, but that is precisely the kind of fiscal manipulation we are seeing from the Prime Minister. He built his reputation on his financial credentials. Canadians were told they could trust him to manage our country’s finances responsibly, but look at what has happened. The debt-to-GDP ratio is no longer the government’s primary fiscal anchor. Every other serious country around the world uses this fiscal anchor, but the Prime Minister has shredded it and made up one of his own. He redefined operating expenses under a broader capital investment framework, allowing spending traditionally treated as operating expenses to be treated as capital investments. There is the borrowing, hundreds of billions of dollars in loans, Crown corporation financing and other financial transactions, that adds to federal borrowing requirements without increasing the reported deficit by the same amount. In other words, the Prime Minister can borrow as much as he would like, and the fiscal anchor he has chosen will never be tripped. Then, the government turns around and tells Canadians that it is on the path to balancing the operating budget. Is that not convenient? Here is what Canadians need to understand. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, over five years, the government is projected to run $333 billion in deficits, but borrow $733 billion. That is a difference of $400 billion. Much of that difference relates to loans, Crown corporation financing and other financial assets. Loans are recorded as assets because there is an expectation that those loans will, of course, be repaid. Let us take the example of Canada Post, a Crown corporation that has loans given by the federal government. It has not reported an annual profit since 2017, and it has accumulated billions of dollars in losses. That raises a very obvious question: How confident can taxpayers be that all government loans will be fully repaid? With the government expanding its use of Crown corporations and other financing vehicles for defence, housing and investment initiatives, Canadians deserve full transparency about the borrowing, liabilities and financial risk involved. Moving borrowing into a different part of the government’s accounts does not make the financial obligations disappear. Here is what makes this even more concerning. The International Monetary Fund has called for greater clarity and independent verification of the government’s fiscal framework. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has warned that the government’s new fiscal anchors provide very little discipline on borrowing. The PBO has made one thing absolutely clear: Balancing the operating budget does not mean that the government’s finances are balanced. Here we have a Prime Minister who built his reputation on financial expertise, asking Canadians to trust him while adopting fiscal measures that provide an incomplete picture of our growing borrowing requirements. Fiscal responsibility is not about how we cleverly present the numbers. It is about whether we can actually control the debt and spending. Changing the accounting does not change the bill that Canadians will ultimately have to pay. On that note, $83 billion in interest means $6,000 per Canadian household just to service the debt. That is $6,000 in taxes just to service the debt. That does not include the repayment of the debt. That is why the Prime Minister must come before committee, answer these questions, explain how he intends to restore fiscal discipline, and present a credible plan for the repayment of the debt so we can bring this amount of debt under control. What concerns me even more than the debt is what all the government spending has actually delivered for Canadians. I judge the success of a government by a very simple measure. Can Canadians build a good life for themselves and their families? Can a young couple afford their first home? Can parents afford to raise their children? Can seniors retire with dignity? Can an honest day’s work still provide a decent standard of living? That is how we should measure success. Today, millions of Canadians are struggling to do precisely those things. We have a record of 2.4 million food bank visits in a single month, and one-third involve children. Let us think about what that says about the state of our country’s finances. This is Canada, one of the wealthiest, most resource-rich nations on earth, yet we have parents working hard, sometimes at multiple jobs, who still cannot afford to put food on the table for their children. We have a moral obligation to help those in need, of course. When someone falls on hard times, when a family faces hardships or when a senior cannot make ends meet, we should stand with them. However, we also have a moral obligation to ask why so many Canadians need that assistance in the first place. Why are millions struggling to afford basic groceries? This is not normal, and we must never accept it as normal. What troubles me is that the Liberals seem to celebrate the number of people receiving government benefits as evidence of their success. I believe they are measuring the wrong thing. I do not want to celebrate how many Canadians depend on government assistance. I want to celebrate how many Canadians no longer need it.”