Tatiana Auguste

“Mr. Speaker, the budget’s number one job should have been to save Canadians money. The reality, however, is that $765 billion in debt is going to get piled on over the next five years. It is a credit card budget that is going to blow up interest rates, inflation and the cost of groceries, gas and housing. This budget is going to make life more expensive for single mothers, small businesses and seniors. For that reason, the Conservatives are going to vote against the budget. We want to save Canadians money and make life more affordable. The minister should have more aptly named this budget “mastered by debt”, mastered by debt that will inflate the cost of food, fuel and housing. The first priority of this budget should have been to save Canadians money, but by adding $765 billion in new debt, a record-smashing sum, over the next five years, the Prime Minister will inflate the cost of fuel, food and homes. This is a costly credit card budget that Canadians cannot afford, and Conservatives will vote no. Let us go through the facts one by one. First are our demands. We asked the Prime Minister to cut gas prices by 20¢ a litre and $1,200 per family by eliminating all federal taxes at the pump. Not only did the Prime Minister fail to do that, but he intends to raise gas taxes early next year, which will mean that Canadians will pay more not only at the pump but also for every single item that arrives at the grocery store. Second, we asked the Liberals to cut waste. Instead, the Prime Minister is growing spending in this budget by an eye-watering $150 billion. Third, we asked the Prime Minister to keep his promise from the election to lower the debt-to-GDP ratio so that our debt no longer gobbles up so much of the resources needed for health care and other basic benefits. Instead, the Prime Minister has officially broken that promise today. As I said, the Prime Minister will add $765 billion to our national debt, the single biggest borrowing binge in Canadian history, more than Trudeau, more than during COVID and more than any other government in the history of this country, an amount that will lead to higher inflation and interest rates today and higher taxes down the road. The single biggest item of spending growth in this budget is not seniors programs, not health care, not security and not sovereignty, but the opposite: It is interest on the national debt. In fact, seniors, single moms and small businesses will now have to spend about $60 billion every year on interest to bankers and bondholders. That is right. It is money for bankers and bondholders instead of nurses and doctors. Every family of four will spend $6,000 this year on interest alone, an amount that rises to $8,100 annually by the year 2030-31. In fact, by that year, the government will be spending $17 billion more on debt interest annually than on health care. To cover up the growing cost of the Prime Minister’s costly credit card budget, he has cooked the books. He has divided the spending onto three separate credit cards: operational, capital and Crown corporations. The only problem is that he has no rule to determine which expense goes where. There is no other government anywhere on earth that follows the accounting practices the Prime Minister is introducing. They violate the generally accepted accounting principles that apply to corporations. If he were to do this with any private company, that company would be charged with defrauding its investors and its workers. Furthermore, the Parliamentary Budget Officer says that there is no defining rule to determine what is operating capital or a Crown corporation, and by putting billions of dollars into the latter category, it is effectively like gambling away a fortune on the company credit card and then pretending one does not have to pay it back. To understand the scale of the financial engineering in which the Prime Minister is engaged, let me put this into perspective. The budget forecasts an already staggering series of deficits of $289 billion over the next five years, but that does not include non-budgetary transactions over the same period of $476 billion, which means that the government will borrow $765 billion over that period, of which two-thirds is hidden from the budget books. Let us get this clear. The Prime Minister intends to borrow half a trillion dollars off the budget books. Here is the bad news for everyone else: They have to pay interest whether the government puts it on the books or not. The Prime Minister can mock Canadians, the single moms, the seniors and the small businesses, as he is doing now, who will have to pay that interest, but none of them will collect the interest on that debt. The Prime Minister should show Canadian taxpayers some respect. The budget should have been about real people with real problems in the real world in their real lives, people like Sally, a single mom and waitress I met at the restaurant in my hotel in Windsor. She works full-time as a waitress, and then she goes over to another hotel and works full-time again, in charge of all the laundry at that other hotel. On the weekends, in her spare time, she has a catering business. She tells me that even with those three jobs, she is not able to get ahead, and she wonders if her three boys will ever be able to afford a home, as I hear Liberals giggling and laughing at her misery on the other side of the House of Commons. That is the callous and cruel mentality that they have toward suffering single moms who cannot afford to pay their bills in this country. There are the young guys I met the other day at a southwestern Ontario pub who work at a GM dealership non-stop. All of them, despite being in their early thirties, believe they will never be able to afford a home. There is the small business owner who has a gym. He came here as an immigrant and opened up a small business with the dream that his family would get ahead, but every year the costs imposed by inflation make it impossible for him to maintain his business and keep his employees going, wondering if he will even be able to stay in business. That is why Conservatives said a week ago that the single job of the budget should be to save Canadians money. We do not do that by adding $765 billion of debt on the backs of Canadians. Then there is the theatre. They claim they are going to help small businesses on capital gains. They listed this new capital gains break, and they said that everyone qualifies, except if they are in agriculture, mining, retail, restaurants, manufacturing or transportation. In other words, everybody qualifies except for everybody. I suspect that if someone wants to qualify, they will have to apply for a special carve-out at the Major Projects Office. Maybe companies that have employees on their payroll can get themselves a tax carve-out. Everyone else will be paying more, will be filling out more forms and will be burdened with even more costs. The only thing worse than the Prime Minister cooking the financial books is his cooking of the books on immigration. We know that he did that last year when he claimed that the population of Canada was 300,000 fewer people than it actually was. We have to wonder: Is it incompetency or is it dishonesty that would have the government lose track of 300,000 people? Today, yet again, the Prime Minister used a side window to increase the number of people who can come in through new programs who are not counted by existing ones. New Canadians and those born and raised here, both of them, deserve an immigration system that works. We need to ensure that we always have housing, health care and jobs by getting immigration back under control. We presented the Prime Minister with a plan to save Canadians money. It started by cutting waste. We proposed approximately $200 billion in savings by cutting bureaucracy, consultants, foreign aid and corporate welfare, as well as by cancelling the Alto project. That project is a waste of money that will only serve to line the pockets of Liberal friends. We proposed these cost-saving measures to reduce the size and cost of government, which weighs heavily on small and medium-sized businesses and ordinary Canadians, like the single mother I spoke about or the young men who want to own a home. We proposed eliminating all taxes on fuel to save 20¢ a litre at the pump and reduce the cost of all products arriving by truck. We asked that the Prime Minister at least keep the election promise he made a year and a half ago to lower the debt-to-GDP ratio. However, the Prime Minister rejected these proposals and jeopardized our financial system. We will continue to fight for Canadians. I would like to share a message of hope with everyone: It is not too late. We can still change the budget. We can replace this credit card budget with one that will save Canadians money. However, that is if and only if the government is prepared to agree to our amendment, which we are proposing in good faith. With this amendment, we will save Canadians money and fill our country with hope. We put forward a plan that would have saved Canadians money by cutting waste, by getting rid of all taxes on gas and by reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio, as the Prime Minister had promised. We put forward a clear plan to save money by cutting bureaucracy, consultants, foreign aid and handouts to fake and phony refugees, and by cutting back on corporate welfare, money that is going to the little club of Liberal insiders, like those at Telesat, one of whom is the Prime Minister’s very close personal friend, whom he helped out with a $2.5-billion handout. Yes, he did. I know he is getting very nervous and agitated about it today, just as he did earlier. By stopping handouts to the big AI giants, which take tax dollars from single moms and small business people, and by cutting back the waste and corruption in the government, he could have taken up our plan to reduce taxes, debt and inflation, but I bring to the government some hope. It is not too late. The Liberals can reverse their costly plan today. They can replace the costly credit card budget with a budget that saves Canadians money, if only they accept our amendment, our friendly amendment, which is brought forth in good faith. I know the Prime Minister will be glad to receive it, so I move: That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following: this House rejects the government’s budget because: (a) This costly credit card budget should be titled “Mastered by Debt”; (b) it inflates the cost of gas, groceries, homes and interest; (c) it fails to save Canadians money and instead costs them more; (d) it fails to take all taxes off gas and diesel and instead raises taxes even further; (e) it adds $765 billion in new borrowing over five years, totalling $44,000 per family; (f) It increases the money spent on debt interest, more than what is spent on health care or the military, totalling $6,000 per family of four; (g) it fails to keep the Prime Minister’s promise to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio; (h) it excludes major regional economic drivers like agriculture, forestry, minerals and fisheries from the capital gains tax exemption; (i) it fails to reduce immigration targets to match the rate of growth in the number of houses, doctors, and jobs; and (j) it fails to eliminate wasteful spending, increases spending on bureaucracy, consultants, corporate handouts, tax havens, foreign aid, deluxe benefits for false asylum claimants and the ALTO Rail boondoggle. This is an amendment brought forward in good faith that will actually save Canadians money and fill this country with a sense of optimism, hope and freedom. I call on the Prime Minister to adopt this motion and put our country first.”