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Adam Chambers

Conservative on Budget 2025 Implementation Act, No. 2

Replying to James Bezan (Conservative)
“Mr. Speaker, my colleague has been doing yeoman’s service on this file for quite some time, including working in the previous Conservative government for finance minister Jim Flaherty, a great finance minister who was able to bring Canada through the economic downturn and balance the books along with Stephen Harper, whose book Here for Canada is on sale today, by the way. It is a great story that I am sure all of us are going to enjoy. When we listen to Liberals on the other side and they talk about how great Crown corporations are and about how wonderful the debt-to-GDP ratio is, we know that, just as with national defence, they love to cook the books and play a shell game. They are doing it this time around by using the Canada pension plan money as a way to show a better position of government debt to GDP. I was wondering if my colleague wanted to comment on how the Liberals always cook the books.”

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Mr. Speaker, the government is setting up the CPPIB, the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, which is viewed around the world as the gold standard for governance, primarily for the reason that it is free from political interference. Every time the government uses the net debt-to-GDP ratio, it confuses the public by suggesting that the assets of the CPP, in effect, may be available to the government to use because the government is using those assets to reduce the amount of money that it shows it owes the rest of the world.