Official Hansard
Madam Speaker, let us make no mistake, this is another Liberal costly credit card budget. This budget has record debt, record debt service charges and record spending. This is just more of the same failed approach we have seen for the last 10 and a half years since the government came into power and inherited a balanced budget. This is a failed approach that is continuing to fail. We have a deficit now on this budget of $67 billion. That is double the budget that was projected in the last Trudeau budget for this year. Does everybody remember what happened then? That was when the Liberals were going to table a budget of $30 billion for the deficit for this year, and that deficit then was considered so big and so bad that Chrystia Freeland resigned rather than table it. Do members remember that day? I was in the lock-up that day. It was pure chaos. Nobody even knew whether the budget was going to be tabled or not. Nobody would sign it. When it was dropped, it had no signature. There was no minister, and nobody was willing to take responsibility for even a $30‑billion deficit projected in this year. It precipitated the eventual resignation of Trudeau. Here we are a year and a half later, and the Liberals are tabling a budget that is twice as bad as that one, which was so bad it brought down a finance minister and a prime minister. They turned to the guy who was supposed to be the adult, who was supposed to have the credentials and be the experienced person who knew that money did not grow on trees, that we could not borrow our way to prosperity and that money borrowed eventually had to be repaid. Everybody thought that was the guy they had gone to. Here we are at $67 billion. That is double the deficit that was so bad a year and a half ago that it brought down a prime minister. This budget is going to begin to squeeze out other spending. The fastest-growing item in this budget and in the projections is debt service. The current expenditure on debt service is $57.8 billion. This is money that is not being spent on health transfers, on old age security and on building, buying and procuring submarines, which is something the Liberals have not done yet. It is the fastest-growing part, and it is going to go to $80 billion in the short-term horizon that this budget covers. We also see debt growing through accounting trickery, because the Liberals are going to borrow $25 billion to fund this so-called wealth fund. It is right there, buried in an appendix at the back. They are going to borrow this money, which is a charge against the consolidated revenue of Canada. It has to be paid, but they offset it and pay it as an offsetting asset, which will not be generating money to repay the debt, and certainly not anytime soon, if ever. The debt is actually getting worse than even the deficit number would state because of this wealth fund that the Liberals have created, so let us talk about an exercise in announce-ology. We heard the previous speaker talk about building Canada. Yes, we need to build in Canada. There are so many things that need to be built in this country. We need a strong Canada. Everybody in the House wants a strong Canada. Every Canadian wants their country to be strong, secure, prosperous, stable and peaceful. These are all the things we want, that all Canadians want, but we are not going to get there by just simply borrowing money and declaring that we have a sovereign wealth fund when there is no wealth backing it. That is not going to get us where we need to go. Think of where we were 10 years ago. The Liberals had a balanced budget. The northern gateway pipeline was approved. The Liberals came in here with an approved pipeline and a balanced budget. Enbridge could have built that pipeline, and today it would be pumping out half a million barrels a day into world markets, creating $50 million a day at today’s prices in revenue, so $20 billion a year. Think of how much in taxes and provincial royalty we could have, and all of these public goods that would have gone toward building schools, hospitals and public services that Canadians rely on, but they cancelled it. It was literally the first thing they did. Now here they are, having this out-of-body experience, wondering why things have not been built in Canada over the last 10 years and why we have this deficit in infrastructure. They ran in 2015, promising to borrow in the short term in order to build infrastructure that would allow the budget to balance itself, but it did not happen. The deficits happened, and they continue to spiral upward to what we have today, a $67-billion deficit. The opportunity lost and squandered over the last 10 years is devastating, and it has accelerated in the last year and a half since they changed leaders on the other side. The deficit and productivity crisis are getting worse. In fact, we are coming up on the second anniversary of when the deputy governor of the Bank of Canada declared productivity to be a break-glass emergency. We are at the bottom of our peer countries in investment, plants, equipment and intellectual property. These are the things that improve the productivity of our economy and lead to higher wages, so that people can afford the increased cost of living. The Liberals ignored this productivity emergency. They are not building productivity-enhancing infrastructure; they just talk. They create new Crown corporations, funds and bureaucratic structures, but we do not see real, tangible infrastructure investment. The last thing, which they are still talking about, was the Alto project. They say it will cost around $90 billion, but an average cost overrun would take that to about $135 billion, and 12 million people a year, according to McGill University, would ride the thing. Doing the math, it would be probably around $500 a ticket just to service the debt that it would cost to build this thing. That is not nation building, it is pet-project annouce-ology, announcing something that people will feel good about, but has no basis in fact. Why do the Liberals not take that money and twin and build a proper Trans Canada highway? We have seriously dangerous portions of the highway where people are killed regularly. The accidents in northern Ontario are horrific. I come from western Canada, where there are some horrific portions of that highway in B.C. Think of the productivity drag. We have ports that are ranked among the very worst in the world. Vancouver, Prince Rupert and Montreal all need billions of dollars in improvement. These are the kinds of things that would improve the productivity of our country. They announced a wealth fund with the same model as the Infrastructure Bank, which was called a failed industrial policy by the Montreal Economic Institute on Monday. Representatives from the Montreal Economic Institute came to committee and said that the Liberals are doing the same thing. It did not work with the Infrastructure Bank, but instead of winding up the Infrastructure Bank and moving on, they are doubling down and creating a new thing where people who are seeking regulatory relief and self-enrichment or subsidies would lobby the government, and those with the best connections would be chosen by the government. This fund would be politically controlled. Its board would be PMO buddies who would approve the projects that the Prime Minister wants to have approved. The Prime Minister said as much. The Liberals have talked about, “We can give regulatory relief or subsidies to some of these guys, but we are going to want a piece of the action, too”. Think of the kind of language that they are using. Why not use a common-sense approach? Let us repeal all of the bad laws the Liberals have passed over the last 10 years that have been chasing investment out of the country and we will see building and construction of a strong, resilient, sovereign Canadian economy. That is the approach Canadians need, not the approach that benefits rent-seekers and insiders rather than the people of Canada.
