Official Hansard
moved: That, given that, (i) sovereign wealth funds must have wealth that comes from budget surpluses and resource revenues, (ii) this government has run no surpluses, only deficits for the last 11 years and has no funds to invest, (iii) the Prime Minister is proposing to put his 25-billion-dollar fund on the national credit card, which will cause further inflationary pressure, (iv) the Prime Minister has already created 12 new Crown corporations, agencies and bureaucracies, (v) when government directs capital, it always goes to the politically powerful and not the deserving, (vi) there is over 1 trillion dollars in pension fund money that Liberals have pushed out of Canada that we could bring back with faster permits, lower taxes and free enterprise, (vii) the rising cost of fuel and food is already burdening hard working Canadians who cannot afford to pay more for handouts to Liberal insiders and corporate elites, therefore, the House call on the government to abandon this sovereign debt fund. He said: Mr. Speaker, today I am responding to the costly, gimmicky schemes of the Prime Minister, who now wants to put $25 billion on the national credit card to fund handouts for well-connected businesses, Liberal elites, and co-operative forces, all while increasing the cost of living for everyone: workers, small businesses, and seniors. We have seen that this Liberal government has already racked up 11 deficits on the national credit card. After a year of this Prime Minister, we are seeing higher costs, more debt, higher taxes, and more money on the credit card. He is just another Liberal. To have a sovereign wealth fund, there need to be funds. There are no funds because there is no surplus, unlike in Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Norway, and so on. These countries have surpluses every year, which they set aside as savings for their countries. They have no deficits. The Conservatives want to remove government barriers in order to attract private investment again, boost our economy and pay our bills through private production. That way, the cost of living will come down for Canadians who are already paying too much. That is how we will free up our economy and restore affordability. We will be strong at home and masters in our own house. Imagine someone went into their doctor’s office, and suddenly the doctor injected them with some strange substance. They asked what it was, and he said that it was a poison. They then asked why he had injected them with a poison. Immediately he pulled out another syringe and injected them with an antidote, and he said he did that so he could save their life with the antidote. They asked why he had done any of it in the first place, and they were told that he wanted to save their life because that is what he does. That is exactly how Liberal economics work. The Liberals do massive economic damage to our country, and then they claim to be its solution, its antidote. The government blocks homebuilding with taxes and red tape then sets up a fourth federal housing agency to subsidize housing. The Liberal Prime Minister blocks resource projects with high taxes, 19‑year permitting delays, and bans on oil shipping off the B.C. coast, and then he creates massive new offices to get projects built, which promise carve-outs, bail-outs and handouts to favourite businesses. The Prime Minister blocks investments with high taxes, drives $1.2 trillion of pension funds out of the country and then subsidizes investment with new corporate welfare programs. He drives up the cost of living and the cost of food with inflationary money printing, carbon taxes and red tape, then prints even more money to give people cash payments to help them with the cost of the food, which he inflated. He blocks development, taxes production, regulates investment, delays permits, drives capital away, kills projects and crushes builders. Then, when the economy slows down, the Prime Minister shows up with a subsidy, a fund, a bank, a summit, a task force and a photo op to solve the very problem he caused. Instead of just following the Hippocratic oath to do no harm, the government does plenty of harm and then claims that it provides the cure. Like the great Ronald Reagan said, if it moves, a Liberal taxes it. If it keeps moving, he regulates it, and when it stops moving, he subsidizes it. Why not just get out of the way and let things move? Why not let the builder build, the worker work, the investor invest, the farmer farm, the miner mine, the manufacturer manufacture and the trucker truck? It is because then there would be no role for the Liberal politician, no power, no control, no permit to authorize and no cheque to hand out. If people could just launch a business, produce resources, grow food and build homes, the Prime Minister and the people within his castle walls would be irrelevant. Instead he forces everything to go through him. He basically creates a regulatory prison and charges a ransom for anyone who wants to build something to get out of it. If they want a place to live or food in their stomach, they have to wait for the government to send back some of their money. If they want to build a home or a pipeline, they have to kneel before the king and seek his good graces. If they want investment for their enterprise, they have to bow before the state. State-controlled crony capitalism is how the Liberal Prime Minister enriched himself. In fact, his Brookfield investments profit off government favours that typically help a tiny group of politically powerful but unproductive takers at the expense of the great mass of productive makers. Help is the sunny side of control. It is the illusion of action from the people who caused the problem, the illusion of investment from the people who drove the investment away and the illusion of growth from those who blocked the growth because, in this Liberal model, the economy does not belong to the people; it belongs to the politicians, bureaucrats and other authorities who control it and the powers that influence them. The real debate in our economy today is that of a political economy versus a market economy. A political economy allocates wealth based on power. A market economy allocates wealth based on free choice. Enter the sovereign wealth fund, which has no wealth. It is another Liberal illusion. Countries with real sovereign wealth funds, such as Singapore, Norway, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, accumulate surpluses year after year, which they then squirrel away and invest to grow bigger returns for their people. The Liberal Prime Minister has no surplus to invest. In fact, the net equity of the government is negative $1.3 trillion. If we take all the assets and deduct all the liabilities, that is what is left. We call that our national debt. Just two days ago, the Prime Minister announced that he is running the 11th Liberal deficit, which is being put on the national credit card. There is more debt, more taxes and more costs on the credit card. The Prime Minister is just another Liberal. In fact, he has doubled the deficit since Trudeau left office, so he has no wealth to put into the wealth fund. He has something else: debt. He wants to put $25 billion more on our national credit card to invest in politically connected companies. Who will get the money? It is those with the political power. The Liberal Prime Minister plans to hold yet another summit, this time with multinational corporations and billionaires, to offer them access to government money and allow them to circumvent the brutal red tape and taxes he imposes on all other businesses. He will demand that these businesses, which will ultimately get permits to go ahead and get around the restrictive red tape and taxes, will give the government an ownership stake. It is almost like charging a ransom for letting them out of the regulatory prison he has created. The million or so small businesses without lobbyists will still be stuck in that regulatory prison, forced to pay taxes to subsidize their larger, more politically powerful competitors. It is the golden rule: Those with the gold make the rules. The small elite turns power into wealth, wealth back into more power and then more power back into more wealth. The cycle continues until they have it all. They get richer, making everyone else poorer. In a political economy, the elite profit not by having the best product, but by having the best lobbyists. It is not how much value they create for customers. It is how much influence they have over ministers, regulators, agencies and insiders. The most important commodities in the political economy are influence and power. In a market economy, people get ahead by serving the people. We sell a product only if someone wants to buy it. We hire a worker only if the worker freely chooses the job and the employer values the work. We attract investment only if we can prove that we can create more value tomorrow than we will consume today. That is the magic of the free market. People cannot get ahead without making someone else better off. We know that because they would not engage in the voluntary transaction if it did not make them better off. That is why, in a free market, when one buys something and says “thank you” to the vendor, the vendor often does not say “you are welcome”. They say “thank you” back. This is because the seller values the money more than what they sold and the buyer values the product more than what they paid. If someone wants an apple and has an orange, and I want an orange and have an apple, and we trade, we still have an apple and an orange between us, but we are both richer because each of us has something worth more to us than what we had before; thus the double “thank you” when we trade. By contrast, a state-controlled economy is based entirely on force. Everything the government does, it does by force because taxation is mandatory and not voluntary. That is why no one ever writes “thank you” on their tax form. The transaction was imposed. Even if it was a good transaction, it was not a free one. Free exchange allows work for wages, product for payment and investment for interest. It is free people making free choices and building a free country. By contrast, a government-controlled economy works differently. As I said, it operates by coercion, and in relationships of coercion, the strongest always win and the weakest always get crushed. The Prime Minister quoted Thucydides in his Davos speech, saying that the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must. The government taxes, regulates and blocks the productive economy, then uses our own money to create programs that promise to fix the damage it caused. This is not Robin Hood. It is the sheriff of Nottingham. It takes from the workers, builders, taxpayers and investors, running their money through bureaucracy, consultants, lobbyists and insiders, and lets a few drops trickle back down to the people who paid for it in the first place. This is state-controlled crony capitalism, a system where government concentrates money in fewer hands based on power, and where most businesses and citizens never have the political clout needed to get a meeting, win a carve-out, secure a subsidy or escape that regulatory prison. Make no mistake, regulatory prison is what it is. If someone wants to build a mine or a pipeline, they must wait. If they want to build a home, they must wait. If they want to build a port, a road, a transmission line, a factory, a terminal, a refinery or a railway, they must wait, fill out the forms, hire consultants, lobby a minister, please the regulator and win some political influence. Maybe they will then have a chance. After years of delay, they might get government support, as the Prime Minister likes to call it. If a project is good enough to receive regulatory support, why not just approve it in the first place? Why should a company have to win over a politician to get something built? Why should a project have to give up a piece of its ownership to the state in order to escape the prison of heavy regulations? This is the model the Liberal Prime Minister believes in, and that is because it is the model that enriched him in the first place, not by doing business in the marketplace, but by using political power to get favours for his company. We remember that the Prime Minister pushed for heat pump subsidies. Well, Brookfield sells heat pumps. We remember that he pushed for money-printing inflation. Well, the CEO of Brookfield confirmed on May 20 of last year that Brookfield profits off of inflation, saying, “many of our things are regulated, rate-based or contractual in nature, and inflation is actually a positive to the numbers, so as inflation comes in, it actually helps the revenue streams of those businesses”. The Prime Minister said a little over a year ago that he had successfully lobbied for a more expensive form of so-called sustainable aviation fuel right before Brookfield, his company, invested a billion dollars in that same fuel, forcing Canadian passengers to pay higher airline fees for this more pricey fuel, which his company then profited from. This is not business; this is political manipulation. It raises the cost for everyone, especially those who do not have political power. That is the difference between the real economy and the protected economy. In the real economy, inflation crushes families. It raises grocery bills. It raises rent and mortgage payments. It costs people more for gas, heat and electricity. It shuts young people out of home ownership and starting families. In a political economy, inflation can be used as a revenue tool for elites and schemers. The government creates the rule. The rule creates the market. The insider sees the rule coming. The insider invests, and the consumer pays the politically connected profit. Everyone else is told that this is progress. Canadians will pay the price through higher inflation at the grocery store, taxes on their paycheques and debt interest for future generations. We have seen this movie before. I just mentioned that there is going to be a big summit where a whole series of multinationals and billionaires will come and feast on this $25 billion. This is not a new idea. In 2016, the Liberal government hosted another international summit of investors at a Shangri‑La hotel to unveil the Infrastructure Bank, a $45‑billion pot of gold that went to subsidizing the investments of insiders. Here we are, 10 years later, and a Liberal government is holding the same kind of summit to allow the same elites to feast on the same debt. Since the creation of the Infrastructure Bank, it has lost hundreds of millions of dollars. For its first seven years, its investment income failed to cover even its operating costs. The Parliamentary Budget Officer found that, when all levels of government were included, two out of every three dollars used for projects funded by the bank came from the taxpayer, not from businesses. Taxpayers lost and insiders won. The bank spent a quarter of a billion dollars on operations. The CEO makes $600,000 a year. It paid out $8 million in bonuses in one year. That is why a parliamentary committee studied it thoroughly and recommended it be eliminated. Now, instead of doing that, the Liberals are augmenting it with yet another slush fund. Then, in September of 2024, the then Liberal finance minister Chrystia Freeland pledged to create a Canada growth fund, seeded with taxpayers’ dollars, to try to bring back the $1.2 trillion of pension funds that the Liberal government had driven abroad. Who was tapped to administer that fund? It was Brookfield. That was barely two years ago, and here we go again. There is another summit, another fund, another transition office and another name for the same old Liberal idea. There is an illusion of change, but the reality is that it is more of the same. Desjardins wrote that the proposed fund draws strong parallels to the Infrastructure Bank. The Montreal Economic Institute called it “essentially the Canadian Infrastructure Bank under a different name.” It is the same poison with a new label, more costs, more corruption, more debt, more taxes and more on the credit card. The Liberal Prime Minister is just another Liberal. We have seen how we can build wealth when we unlock the power of the free enterprise system. The answer is not to weigh the economy down with even more government agencies on top of the countless number that already existed a year ago, and the 13 new ones that the Prime Minister has since created. We need to unblock and unlock the potential of our resources and our people. The answer is more economic freedom, such as the freedom to build, to produce, to hire, to invest and to compete. We must replace an economy of carve-outs, handouts and bailouts for insiders with free choice, opportunity and affordability. If a project is safe, lawful and in the national interest, just approve it. If a company can build without taxpayers’ money, let it build now. If workers can build bigger paycheques by producing energy, minerals, food, homes, steel, aluminum, copper and more, we need to get the government out of the way and let them do it. Let businesses compete for customers, not political favour. Let entrepreneurs win with the best product, not the best lobbyists. Let workers earn a powerful paycheque, not wait for government handouts. Let Canadians build sovereign wealth, not borrow sovereign debt. This is the choice: state-controlled crony capitalism, where political influence becomes the most valuable commodity, or a free market where work, savings, risk-taking and service create prosperity for everyone. The options are a top-down, state-controlled, crony capitalist system or a bottom-up, merit-based, free enterprise system. A political aristocracy or an economic meritocracy is the choice. We want this to be a country that restores the promise to the people that anyone who works hard can enjoy an affordable home, a safe street, good food on the table and realize their dreams. We want a country where our people get ahead by having the best product and the best work, not by having the most political influence. We do not want a country of bureaucrats and busybodies, of gatekeepers and grifters, of tax collectors and toll masters. We want a country of artists and adventurers, entrepreneurs and explorers, workers and warriors, pioneers and patriots. That is the country we seek to build. Now, let us get to building.
