“I want the House to pass my motion telling the Prime Minister to testify at the finance committee. Government spending is driving up debt and the cost of living. More people in my riding are using food banks, including workers and seniors. The Prime Minister must explain how he plans to cut deficits, debt interest, and taxes.”

“moved: That, given that, (i) the cost of government is driving up the cost of living, (ii) the Parliamentary Budget Officer reports that this government’s fastest-growing cost is interest on the national debt which has more than doubled since 2021, (iii) this Liberal government now spends more on debt interest than the Canada Health Transfer, (iv) an average family of four will pay nearly $6,000 in federal taxes toward interest on the national debt this year, based on numbers from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, (v) the Prime Minister promised that he would reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio and deficit-to-GDP ratio, the House call on the Prime Minister to appear as a witness before the Standing Committee on Finance to testify on saving Canadians money by cutting deficit spending, debt interest and taxes. He said: Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by saying that I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Wellington—Halton Hills North. I rise today to speak to my opposition day motion. The motion calls on the Prime Minister to appear before the Standing Committee on Finance to explain how his government plans to cut deficit spending, debt interest and the tax burden on Canadians. Behind the billions of dollars we discuss here in Ottawa lies a reality we must never lose sight of: that of hard-working families, retirees counting every dollar, entrepreneurs trying to keep their businesses afloat and young people dreaming of owning a home. In my riding of Richmond—Arthabaska—des‑Sources, I meet people who get up early, work long hours and do everything they can to provide a good life for their families. These are farmers, manufacturing workers, business owners, young families and seniors who have contributed to our society throughout their lives. These people are not asking for the moon. They want to be able to cover the cost of groceries, the mortgage, home heating and other bills without constantly worrying about their finances. Above all, they want to know that the tax dollars they hand over to the federal government are being used responsibly. Public finances are not merely a matter of figures. They have a very real impact on the lives of Canadians. On October 20, the Parliamentary Budget Officer published her latest economic and fiscal outlook, and those figures should give us all pause for thought. According to this report, Canada’s real economic growth is expected to reach just 0.9% in 2026 and 1.5% in 2027. These are modest growth rates for a country blessed with such abundant natural resources, such talented people and such significant economic potential. For Conservatives and for me, that is simply not good enough. Surely, we can be more ambitious. Meanwhile, federal deficits are projected to total more than $333 billion over the next five years. That is not all. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the federal deficit is expected to reach $63 billion this year, before rising to $70 billion in 2027-28. Even in 2030-31, the government is projected to run a deficit of nearly $68 billion. In other words, these forecasts do not point to a return to a balanced budget at any point during the period under review. I want to call attention to another very alarming item in the report. Public debt charges now make up the fastest-growing category of federal expenditures. In 2021‑22, they amounted to $24.5 billion. This year, they are expected to reach $60 billion. By 2030-31, the cost of debt charges alone could reach $83 billion. These funds are not going to be used to build hospitals, hire nurses, improve our roads and highways or give Canadians a break on their grocery bills. They will be used to meet financial obligations racked up the government. Of course, all governments have to be able to borrow. Debt can be useful for funding necessary and productive investments. However, the government has to be able to show that the borrowed funds will produce tangible results and that public finances will remain manageable. This is exactly why we are requesting today that the Prime Minister come and explain himself before the finance committee. We are seeing no results on the ground. In fact, daily life is growing worse for our people. I would now like to focus this debate on a reality that I am very familiar with, the reality of Richmond—Arthabaska—des-Sources. In my region, we are fortunate to have innovative entrepreneurs, passionate farmers, manufacturers and community organizations that do outstanding work. However, behind this economic vitality, there are also people facing significant financial hardship. The recent statistics on food assistance are particularly telling. According to Moisson Mauricie—Centre-du-Québec’s 2026 hunger report, the network of 61 member organizations are now responding to over 137,000 requests for food assistance every month. That is an increase of 23% in just one year and an increase of 60% in five years. I repeat: Requests for food assistance have increased by 60% in five years. What is even more worrisome is that nearly 13% of the households assisted by this network have employment income. They have an income, but they are still struggling to make ends meet. That means that people are working, getting paid and yet still have to ask for help to put food on the table. That is what is happening. The report also indicates that over 17% of the households that receive assistance rely mainly on an old age pension or retirement pension. Let us think about these seniors who worked for 30, 40 or 50 years. These are people who paid their taxes, raised their children and families and contributed to the development of our community. Today, some of them have to turn to food banks to make ends meet. That is what is happening right now. This situation deserves our full attention. I want to take this opportunity to thank the volunteers and community organizations in our regions that meet these needs every day. Their work is essential. However, we should be asking ourselves why so many Canadians need their services. Our collective goal should be to allow people to live with dignity from their work and their retirement income. In a country as rich as ours, both in terms of resources and opportunities, we need to find a way to make the essentials more affordable. That means a more productive economy, investments that create wealth and the sound management of public finances. We need to put an end to the Liberal culture of reckless spending. This Liberal culture is all about reckless spending. I am also thinking about the farmers in my riding. In Richmond—Arthabaska—des-Sources, agriculture plays a significant role in our economy and our regional identity. Our producers have to contend with the cost of fuel, machinery, equipment, fertilizers and transportation. When a farmer’s expenses rise, they cannot always incorporate those costs into the selling price of their products. They often have to absorb the increase at the expense of their profitability. When production and transportation costs rise throughout the food chain, this inevitably affects the price paid at the grocery store. That is why economic decisions made here in Ottawa have to take into account the impact on businesses and families in our regions. The same goes for our manufacturing companies. When a company needs to invest more to modernize, hire workers, or break into new markets, it needs a predictable economic environment. As a former entrepreneur, I know that what people need is predictability. Businesses need to have confidence in the future. They need a government capable of distinguishing between investments that truly foster growth and spending that simply burdens public finances. Prosperity cannot be decreed. It is built through hard work, innovation, investment, and entrepreneurship. The Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report also raises a fundamental question about the government’s financial commitments. The Prime Minister promised to reduce the deficit-to-GDP ratio. However, according to projections published on October 20, that target is unlikely to be consistently met. The Prime Minister has to be able to defend his choices to the representatives of the people of Canada. I want to close by calling to mind once again the people of my riding. A family in Victoriaville will have to make choices when revising its budget, because the cost of essentials continues to rise. The Prime Minister also has to make choices. We expect him to appear before the Standing Committee on Finance to answer our questions and those of concerned Canadians.”

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“I want to thank the volunteers in my riding who raise money to feed people. They have to do this because the government is not helping them. The real goal must be making life affordable so people can make ends meet.”

“Madam Speaker, once again, I want to thank the people and volunteers getting involved in our communities. In my riding, a group of men founded Clan Destins, which supports the Boîtes à lunch program. These individuals have dedicated themselves to the cause and are raising funds because the government is currently unable to support them. I thank them for that. What we need right now is for people to be able to make ends meet. That is the ultimate goal.”

“The member must have missed my speech. I did talk about seniors who worked for decades and paid taxes all their lives.”

“Madam Speaker, with all due respect to my colleague, I think she must have been absent during my speech, in which I spoke about our seniors who worked for 30, 40 or 50 years and paid taxes all their lives. That is exactly what I said in the speech I delivered a few minutes ago.”

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“Conservatives want to lower taxes. We need to cut rules in Ottawa, make the government smaller, and leave more money with Canadians. A Conservative government will do that.”

“Madam Speaker, the Conservative Party is the party that wants to lower taxes. We need to cut red tape in Ottawa, reduce the size of government and put money back in the pockets of all Canadians. That is what the next Conservative government will do.”

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“Interest on the national debt is growing faster than our spending on health care. I want to ask my colleague how the government could cut spending and balance the budget.”

“Madam Speaker, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the interest on the national debt is the fastest-growing category of government expenditures, outpacing health care transfers. How does my colleague think the government could reduce spending and put the budget back on a more responsible path?”

“We are paying more on debt interest than we spend on health care. The government wastes money without getting results. It must stop this reckless spending and manage our money properly.”

“Madam Speaker, it is unbelievable. We are paying more for interest on the debt than we are investing in health care, as my colleague just said. Has anyone thought about everything that could be done with that money? The problem is the current Liberal culture; the Liberals spend recklessly without achieving any results. I often talk about a real-life example involving the lease of a parcel of land in Nova Scotia. A private company leases land for $13,500 and is leasing it back to the Liberal government for $20 million a year for 10 years. That comes to $200 million. That is how the government spends its money. We need sound management, and the culture of reckless spending must end.”

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“The government's economic plan is failing. Debt is growing twice as fast as the deficit, and the government is hiding it through accounting tricks with Crown corporations. We are spending more and more tax dollars just to pay interest on that debt, while economic growth is almost zero. The government has broken every spending promise it has made since 2015. I want the House to vote for this motion.”

“Madam Speaker, the government’s economic plan is not working. We now have enough data coming in over the last 18 months of the Prime Minister’s tenure to know that its plan is not working. That is confirmed by the most recent report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer of October 20, which warns that the federal debt is growing at two times the pace of the federal deficit. That is because the government is capitalizing the borrowing it is doing and putting it on the balance sheet through the use of arm’s-length entities like Crown corporations rather than expensing it on the profit and loss statement, on the budget. This accounting is in some ways hiding the pace of the growth of the federal debt. As a result, the PBO projects that the federal debt will increase this year from 41% of GDP to 43% of GDP by decade’s end, going from $1.3 trillion to $1.67 trillion, an increase of some $367 billion. This is despite the fact that the Liberal Party and the Prime Minister promised in the last election to ensure, “debt-to-GDP declines over the budget horizon.” Clearly, the government is not abiding by its commitment in its last platform. This massive growth in the federal debt is having real consequences. As a result of this acceleration of the growth in the federal debt, two times the pace of the deficit, interest on the national debt is now starting to grow at an alarming pace. Just several years ago, interest on the national debt cost six cents for every tax dollar of revenue. Today, it is 10.5¢ for every tax dollar of revenue. By decade’s end, in a mere just over three years, it is going to be almost 14¢ of every tax dollar, which is projected to be approximately $83 billion a year. That is almost one and a half times what the federal government spends in cash transfers on public health care. For those who say that that amount is not nearly as high as the crisis we faced in the 1980s and 1990s, I looked at the interest expense ratio charts the government produces. When the interest on the national debt started to accelerate in the late 1970s, if I recall correctly, in 1977 it was a mere 14¢ of every tax dollar. A short six or seven years later, it had skyrocketed well beyond 20¢, hitting 30¢ per tax dollar in less than a decade, leading to the fiscal crisis of the mid-1990s. This growth in interest on the national debt is concerning. It is an alarm that has been raised by many of the folks who helped get Canada on the right fiscal track in the late 1990s, like Don Drummond, who has been saying that the government should abide by its fiscal anchors and keep the debt-to-GDP ratio on a declining track, and that we are putting the very hard-earned gains of the 1990s at risk. Those hard-earned gains led to a much lower cost of capital for this country relative to other economic peers such as the United States. That is being put at risk with the government’s reckless spending. Even though the government is borrowing at twice the pace and is spending way more than the previous Trudeau government, with deficits double that of the last budget of Minister Chrystia Freeland at almost 2% rather than 1% of GDP, and is spending tons of money and borrowing even more money, the economy is not doing well. In fact, economic growth is being downgraded. The PBO downgraded economic growth for this year to 0.9%. That follows on the heels of other economic projections, which have downgraded growth over the last couple of months. The Bank of Canada has downgraded growth, and bank economists have downgraded growth. We are now in a situation where growth has been downgraded to less than 1% this year, effectively zero, all while affordability and inflation continue to be a problem. In fact, the markets are projecting that the Bank of Canada is going to hike interest rates. We have somewhat of a stagflationary environment here, again, proof that the government’s economic plan is not working. I would like to finish by focusing on this fact: The previous Liberal government blew through every fiscal anchor it established. I reviewed all the fiscal anchors it established. Do we remember the 2015 Liberal promise of a fiscal anchor, the one that they campaigned on in that election, that we would run budget deficits just on a temporary basis, capped at no more than $10 billion a year and just for a couple of years, and would return to budget balance? When they came to office, the Liberals threw that plan out the window, just like they chucked out the plan to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio they made in the last election. In the Liberals’ first budget, they replaced that temporary set of deficits with a new fiscal anchor of a shrinking federal debt-to-GDP ratio over the medium term. Then they abandoned that fiscal anchor. In the fall economic statement of 2020, Minister Freeland introduced new fiscal anchors tied to labour market indicators such as employment and unemployment. These guardrails were later dropped. Then the government came forward with a new fiscal anchor, which in some ways was the old fiscal anchor. The Liberals came forward with the fiscal anchor of refocusing on reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio. They introduced that fiscal anchor in budget 2022. That ratio did not move consistently downward, and so they later abandoned that pledge. The Liberals came up with a new pledge in the fall economic statement of 2023, where they decided that their new anchor would be to keep annual deficits below 1% of GDP. Then we got a new Prime Minister and a new Liberal leader who replaced that fiscal anchor with two new fiscal anchors, abandoning the fiscal anchor he had promised in the platform and in the last budget. Those two new fiscal anchors were a declining deficit-to-GDP ratio and to balance operating expenses with revenue by 2028-29. Here we are, less than a year later, and the government is going to blow through that umpteenth fiscal anchor that it established because the PBO projects that deficits to GDP are going to be increasing rather than decreasing, from 1.8% this year to 2% in 2027-28. I would note that this fiscal anchor is double the previous fiscal anchor that Minister Freeland had established. The government and the Prime Minister are putting us on a reckless path of spending and ever-increasing deficits. That is particularly worrying when we look at what is going on with countries that are facing high debt loads, such as France, and when we look at what is going on with the pace of growth of the U.S. deficit and debt. We are not an island, and we are not a reserve currency. If there is going to be a crisis in sovereign debt borrowing, Canada is particularly vulnerable, as we were in the mid-1990s, and we will be buffeted by whatever crisis takes place outside of this country because of this ever-increasing debt and this ever-increasing interest on the debt. The PBO is highlighting what many other reports have highlighted: that the government’s economic plan is not working, that the national debt is growing at double the pace of deficits, that economic growth is slowing, that inflation is starting to take hold again and that affordability remains a crisis. For all those reasons, I encourage the House to vote for the motion.”

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  “The government's economic plan is not working.”

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“Canada's debt is in worse shape than international reports say. Our provinces carry huge debts, with Ontario owing more than California. Our currency is also weaker than those of other major countries. The government needs to fix our economy by helping businesses produce more, not by spending money to boost demand.”

“Madam Speaker, I disagree with the IMF’s assertion that Canada’s debt to GDP is in good shape. I think that fails to take into account the fact that Canada’s subnational governments have some of the highest, if not the highest, indebtedness in the OECD. If I recall correctly, the Province of Ontario has more debt than the State of California, whose economy is bigger than Canada’s. Subnational debt in the United States is much lower than in Canada, and that is not incorporated into the G7 rankings that the IMF has analyzed, nor is the fact that of the G7 countries, Canada is the smallest currency and is not a reserve currency, unlike the other members of the European Union, in the Eurozone, the United States or Japan. I think that assertion fails to take into account what the member opposite has been talking about. In brief, to finish, the solution is to address supply-side reforms, rather than the government’s approach of always subsidizing demand-side initiatives. That is the fundamental problem with the government’s economic approach.”

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“We must protect francophone rights, and we need a growing economy to pay for francophone programs. The government just spends more money instead of making the economic changes we need to actually grow the economy.”

“Madam Speaker, I think it is vital to defend the rights of francophones across Canada. I think that starts with ensuring that our economy grows significantly to make it possible to subsidize programs for francophones and the French fact in Canada. The problem with the government’s economic plan is that whenever a challenge arises, its response is more government spending rather than the kind of fundamental economic reforms that would create the conditions for stronger GDP growth and a more productive economy That is the fundamental problem with the government’s plan.”

“We are adding thousands of dollars to the debt every second. I want my colleague to explain to the Liberals again why debt is bad.”

“Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his very expensive speech, as it turns out. I just googled the debt. We are spending between $2,500 and $5,000 per second in this country on the debt. The 10-minute speech was a $3-million speech. It may only have been $1.5 million on the lower part. I would like my colleague to explain to the Liberals once again why debt is bad.”

“Our growing debt worries me. Paying for it takes too much government revenue, which puts programs like health care and education at risk.”

“Madam Speaker, the growth in the debt is concerning, because we have seen this story play out before. It starts to chew up an ever-increasing amount of federal revenues, putting at risk the very social programs, like health care and education, that Canadians rely upon.”

“The government has borrowed and printed money for 11 years. Paying interest on the debt costs about $60 billion and could soon cost $80 billion. Canadians are still lining up at food banks and cannot get ahead. I want the member to explain how this makes sense.”

“Mr. Speaker, the hon. member representing the government is omitting a key fact. The government, for the last 11 years, has been borrowing money and promising Canadians that the next day will be a better day. The government is printing money and piling on the debt. Our debt service is somewhere around $60 billion, and will probably be $80 billion in two or three years. That is very concerning. Anyone with the right economic mind can understand how concerning that is to Canadians’ lives. Canadians are still lining up at food banks. The Liberals are printing all this money, borrowing all this money. It is billions of dollars. The debt service is piling up and Canadians are not getting ahead. How does that make sense to the member?”

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  “Canadians are lining up at food banks.”

  Said 3 times by 3 members since April 30.

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