Vincent Ho

In response to a question from Steven Bonk

“This bill gives decision-making power to unelected officials instead of Parliament. Elected members are the ones who answer to Canadians and parents. Parliament should make these decisions, not regulators.”

“Mr. Speaker, this is one of the alarming features of the government. It tends to trust unelected bureaucrats, and its members tend to defend those decisions. They tend to forget that they are elected by the people. They are elected by Canadians to work for Canadians, to listen to Canadians, to express the concerns of Canadians and, in this case, to listen to parents and protect the interests of children. Parliament is right to be able to ask those questions rather than ceding our decision-making authority to unelected regulators that these Liberals love to defend.”

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In response to a question from Gabriel Ste-Marie

“I want the government to explain how this bill deals with other countries' laws. Canadian rules on keeping private data might clash with laws in other countries. The government needs to answer this.”

“Mr. Speaker, the question the member brings up is about the issue of jurisdiction. That is a question that should be asked as well. Jurisdiction is an issue that perhaps applies to laws that are made even outside of Canada. There may be laws from other countries that these social media platforms have to adhere to about data retention. For example, if there is a Canadian law that says that these companies have to retain the private information of individuals and that this Canadian law may require it to be destroyed, rightly so, after the purpose has been met, it might actually contravene another law of a different country. These are questions that are worth asking and that the government needs to answer.”

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In response to a question from Marilyn Gladu

“Parents want their children protected online and tech companies held accountable. But this bill just creates more paperwork without actually keeping kids safe. In Australia, a similar law did not reduce complaints about online harm. The government needs to answer these concerns.”

“Mr. Speaker, these are questions that Parliament should be asking and that parents are demanding answers to. Parents expect their children to be protected. They expect technology companies to be held accountable. What Canadians do not want to see is a new online regime that creates more paperwork and more compliance, and where success is measured through mere compliance with those requirements, as we see in the case of Australia, where the effects have not been wildly positive. As a matter of fact, harm complaints are at the same levels as before the legislation was enacted. These are serious questions that should be asked, questions that the government should be able to answer.”

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“I agree that we need to protect children online, but we must study this bill very carefully before passing it. Too many important rules are left to unelected officials instead of Parliament. I am worried about people's privacy if they have to prove their age, and huge fines might push companies to censor lawful speech. Other countries have tried these bans and failed to protect kids. We need to make sure this bill actually keeps children safe instead of just creating more paperwork.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise today to speak to Bill C-34, the safe social media act, on behalf of the constituents of Richmond Hill South. Children need real protection online and parents need confidence that the services their children use are designed with their safety in mind. Children are being harmed, families are looking for answers and technology companies have too often left parents to manage risks that those companies are sometimes better positioned to address. Holding social media platforms accountable should be a shared commitment across the House, but would Bill C-34 deliver that accountability? If it is passed, how will we know whether it is working? Would success mean fewer children experiencing exploitation, harassment and harmful interactions, or would it mean that platforms have filed the required plans and completed the necessary paperwork? Those are different outcomes, and Parliament should be clear about which one matters. As lawmakers, we should examine its proposals seriously. At the same time, supporting the objective does not relieve us of the responsibility to scrutinize the approach. The bill shares important features with and seems to draw inspiration from the European Union’s model of platform regulation, including risk management obligations, transparency requirements and an oversight regulator. That comparison is particularly timely because the Canada-European Union summit begins today in Montreal, with digital co-operation among the subjects on its published agenda. What does the government intend that co-operation to include? Will it involve research, enforcement, co-operation and sharing evidence, or could it involve commitments to align Canadian legislation with European rules made overseas? Will we be ceding our authority in this Canadian Parliament to the European Parliament? Will the Canadian government retain our own regulatory authority in respect of Canadians, or will co-operation yield jurisdiction to European regulators? The EU’s proposed kids act provides an interesting comparison. It proposes independent accounts from age 15 and up, with supervised restricted accounts for 13- and 14-year-olds and a ban on access for children under the age of 13. Bill C-34 proposes an under the age of 16 account restriction for specified services. The Europeans have chosen to go with a different age threshold and a phased approach. The EU’s proposed kids act is also far more broad in scope, covering app stores, operating systems and gaming platforms, which are not contemplated in Bill C-34. Canadians should know whether their government is contemplating any commitment to follow the European proposal and how it intends to preserve the Canadian Parliament’s ability to make decisions suited to Canadian circumstances. Will Parliament see the terms of any proposed alignment, and will Canadian families have a meaningful opportunity to explain how those choices would affect them? That brings me to the implementation. The bill would require protective design features, but important details would be established through regulations by unelected government officials rather than legislation made by elected lawmakers. What would that mean for recommendation feeds and that repeatedly direct children toward disturbing material? What would it mean for autoplay, persistent notifications or design choices that encourage young people to remain online long after they intended to leave? How much of the practical protection would Canadians understand when Parliament votes, and how much would become clear only after regulations by this new digital safety commission are developed at a future date? There can be reasons to leave technical details to regulations, particularly when technology changes quickly, but elected representatives should still understand the specifics of the framework they are being asked to approve. What measurable outcomes would the government publish and what would trigger a change in approach if the evidence shows that children remain exposed to the same harms and that the unelected regulators and this new digital safety commission are failing to meet the stated legislative objectives? We should examine the proposed account restriction with the same seriousness. If teenagers lose access to familiar platforms, where would they go? Could some move to smaller services with weaker safeguards, less moderation and fewer opportunities for parents to understand what is happening? That is a risk to investigate rather than an outcome we should assume, but surely an implementation plan must consider what would happen after an account is blocked. Australia’s early experience illustrates why evaluation matters. Its online safety regulator reported that 70% of children under 16 who had accounts before the restriction were able to retain them or create new ones at the three-month mark, while also reporting that harm complaint did not decline at all. What lessons has the government drawn from that experience? What would Canada do differently where enforcement has proved difficult? How would platforms deal with false ages, borrowed accounts or attempts to evade location checks, including through VPNs? Would those efforts produce effective protection or repeated demands for more information from everyone using the service? Parents know their children in ways that politicians and regulators cannot and will not, so how would this framework give families practical tools while ensuring that companies retain responsibility for the risks they may have helped expose children to? The scope of the legislation also deserves careful examination. The bill provides for user thresholds established through regulations but it also allows particular, smaller social media services to be designated where significant risks exist. It contains a mechanism for bringing additional categories of online services into the framework. The question, therefore, is how effectively those powers would be used when children’s behaviour changes. Would elected members in the Parliament get a say? Would this inadvertently create uncertainty for industry? How quickly could government respond if young people migrated to a smaller service that fell below the general threshold but presented comparable dangers? We should also ask how interactive gaming environments would be assessed, as opposed to just conventional social media feeds. When a service combines gaming, public interaction, private communication and user-generated content, which features of the service would determine its treatment and how would parents know which protections apply? Those implementation questions become even more important when we consider privacy. Age assurance and verification call into question whether it would require every Canadian to upload a driver’s licence or photo identification and what sorts of technologies would be used in the process of verification and storage. The legislation would, however, contemplate age verification or estimation, which raises practical questions about what information would be collected, who would handle it and how compliance would be checked. The bill includes safeguards restricting the use of that information, requiring its protection and providing for its destruction once the age check is complete, but how exactly to ensure that? Those requirements matter but parents will reasonably ask how they would be enforced across contractors, verification vendors, backup systems and the data retention laws of other jurisdictions. What evidence would establish that information has been deleted? How would failures be detected and what remedy would a family have if sensitive information was exposed before the regulator discovered that something had gone wrong? No government can honestly promise that a data breach will never occur, which makes it essential to minimize collection and demonstrate why any information being requested is necessary. The governance of the new commission deserves an equally careful examination, particularly because rule-making, investigation, enforcement and decision-making functions place substantial authority within the same institution. The bill would assign substantial powers to cabinet and the commission rather than to Parliament. The new commissioner would serve as a sort of superregulator that will wield serious power by acting as a rule-maker, investigator, enforcer, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner all at the same time. When Parliament delegates consequential choices about the boundaries of an online safety regime, Canadians should be able to understand who makes those choices, what evidence supports them and how an error can be challenged. Would the opportunities to make representations, the reporting requirements and the available avenues of review be sufficient to provide meaningful accountability, especially for an individual or smaller business without extensive legal resources? How would Parliament assess whether the commission was exercising its authority proportionately and what information would allow members to distinguish effective protection from administrative activity? Freedom of expression must remain part of that assessment. Bill C-34 leaves the definition of regulated social media services to future regulations by unelected government officials. It defines some categories of harmful content but those definitions still require further interpretation and platforms still make decisions about individual posts in circumstances where context can be difficult for automated systems to understand. How would it distinguish the discussion of self-harm intended to help a young person from material encouraging it or distinguish reporting on hateful conduct from endorsing that conduct? How would the threshold of harmful content be determined and how would it be applied? The maximum administrative monetary penalty is the greater of $10 million and 3% of global revenue. Could the penalty create an incentive to encourage excessive restriction of lawful, educational, artistic or political expression? How would the government measure and correct that possibility? Would it inadvertently stifle freedom of expression and the creation of new services? Related legislation elsewhere has faced constitutional challenges just south of the border, including state-level laws on social media age verification and bans, with various provisions from at least half a dozen jurisdictions being suspended or subject to judicial scrutiny. The question is how the Canadian charter would apply to Bill CC-34. What has the government learned from those disputes in other jurisdictions? How has that analysis informed provisions intended to provide durable protection rather than years of uncertainty and litigation? These questions come from taking the objective seriously. Families deserve protection that works. Companies deserve clear obligations that can be held to. Canadians deserve confidence that privacy and lawful expression will receive meaningful protection throughout implementation. We should study Bill C-34 carefully and insist not on a mere compliance regime where success is measured by how much paperwork it produces but a framework where success is measured by safer children and accountable companies. That is the responsibility before the House.”

“Canada lost 110,000 jobs in the last two months, and our unemployment rate is 6.5%. People are worried about losing their work while life gets more expensive. I want the Prime Minister to admit he is failing on jobs.”

“Madam Speaker, it is Thanksgiving, and this morning’s latest job numbers are devastating. Almost 70,000 jobs were lost in September, bringing that to a staggering 110,000 jobs lost in just two months. Unemployment has skyrocketed to 6.5%, which is the second highest in the G7. Recently I spoke with Jordan, a father in Richmond Hill who is worried about losing his job while struggling to keep up with the Liberal affordability crisis. While hard-working Canadians worry about their next paycheque, the out-of-touch Liberal government keeps delivering more talk but no results. How many more Canadians have to lose their jobs before the Liberal Prime Minister puts down the $500 buttercups and admits that he is failing to do his?”

In response to a question from Gabriel Ste-Marie

“Workers across the country are striking because living costs are too high. I blame the Liberals and their spending for high food and housing prices. The government must cut spending to lower costs for Canadians.”

“Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for bringing up all of the labour unrest we have seen over the last 11 years under the Liberal government. The labour unrest we are seeing all across the country in almost every sector is a symptom. It is a symptom of 11 years of economic mismanagement, of a cost of living crisis that Canadians have to live through, of having the fastest food inflation and the most unaffordable housing in the G7. This is a Liberal-sponsored cost of living crisis that we are living in, and the rising costs are what is causing the labour unrest we are seeing across the country. If we can address the endless inflationary spending and bring down the cost of living, then Canadians can finally afford to live again, but the Liberals choose to live in rhetoric rather than taking real action.”

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In response to a question from Kevin Lamoureux

“I oppose this bill. The government makes many announcements, but they do not get real results. They are just trying to turn a party slogan into a federal law.”

“Mr. Speaker, the Liberal member is repeating talking points over and over again, and that one-minute spiel of his is not only raising the noise pollution in this chamber. It is also a testament to the Liberal talking points that have been spouted at Canadians over the last 18 months, which is that they want to do more, but there are no results. All we see is more talk, more announcements and more rhetoric coming from the Liberals. This entire act is called the building Canada strong act. That is a Liberal partisan slogan, which they now want to enact as federal law. That is the thing about the Liberals. They do not want to get things done. All they want to do is talk a big game and have no results to show for it.”

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“I oppose this bill. The government promised to speed up construction, but hundreds of projects are still waiting for approval. Adding another large bill and more bureaucrats will only cause more delays. We need to cut red tape, approve projects within six months, and let workers actually build things.”

“Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister promised Canadians that his government was going to build at speeds not seen in generations, and I will give him this much: He was right, because Canadians have not seen a government build this slowly in generations. A year and a half ago, the Liberals came before Canadians with Bill C-5 and told us that everything was about to change. We were told that Canada was entering a new era, that projects would finally move quickly, that investment would finally flow and that the Liberal government was going to unleash construction at a pace Canadians had not seen in decades. Eighteen months after the Liberals took office, Canadians are still left waiting. Not one new project has been approved by the Liberal Major Projects Office. Approximately 500 projects are still waiting for approval, and the government that promised historic speed has produced historic delay. The only thing the Major Projects Office has managed to accomplish is to establish a brand new Liberal bureaucracy and hire Liberal insiders and friends of the Prime Minister as new high-priced bureaucrats at the taxpayers’ expense. It is no wonder the Major Projects Office is being touted as the major photo ops office. Now, eighteen months later, the Liberal Prime Minister has returned to the House with Bill C-39, another piece of legislation approaching 250 pages. The Liberals are once again telling Canadians that this time they have finally found the answer. Well, we have heard this before. For years, Conservatives have told the government exactly what it needs to do if it wants to get Canada building. We have told it to approve major projects within six months; repeal the antidevelopment laws Liberal Bill C-69 and Liberal Bill C-48, which are still on the books; eliminate unnecessary duplication between governments; adopt a one project, one single review system; and provide investors with the certainty that if they put billions of dollars into Canada, they will actually have a reasonable opportunity to build something here. Instead, the Liberals have spent years creating more layers of regulations, more uncertainty, more Liberal bureaucracies and more opportunities for delay. Then, after creating the problem, the Liberals arrive in the House every couple of years with another enormous piece of legislation announcing they are going to solve it. That is the pattern that Canadians have watched for more than a decade: create a Liberal-sponsored problem, announce a new Liberal program, create a new Liberal office, hire more Liberal bureaucrats, hold a Liberal press conference, hold a Liberal photo op, declare victory and then wonder why nothing gets built. Canadians are not going to judge this legislation by its partisan Liberal title, by the Liberal press releases announcing it or by the talking points that Liberal ministers repeat on state-sponsored mass media. Canadians are going to judge it by whether it saves Canadians money, protects Canadian jobs and actually gets projects built. The problem Canada faces today is not a shortage of Liberal announcements. The Liberals are only good at delivering announcements and strategies drafted by Liberal consultants. These new offices are usually staffed by Liberal insiders, these frameworks are usually crafted by Liberal strategists, and Liberal memoranda of understanding have no legally binding effect. We have Liberal ministers travelling across the country standing beside maps and artists’ renderings of things that might one day get built. What Canadians are missing are completed approvals, shovels in the ground, workers on job sites and projects actually being constructed. Pipelines do not carry energy products because they appear on some Liberal government list or on a website updated by a Liberal staffer. Mines do not produce critical minerals because a Liberal minister holds a press conference. Ports do not have another container moved because a Liberal memorandum of understanding with no legal effect has been signed. Factories do not employ Canadian workers because somebody in Ottawa created another Liberal advisory council drafted by some Liberal consultants. At some point, the Liberal government has to stop announcing that it intends to build and start allowing Canadians to actually build. That is the fundamental problem with the Liberal approach over the last decade. The government acts as though economic growth is something that can be produced by Ottawa through more legislation, more regulation and more bureaucracy, when in reality, Liberal governments do not build most of these projects. Workers build them. Private investors invest in them, businesses operate them, engineers design them, tradespeople construct them, and entrepreneurs take the risks necessary to actually make it happen. The government’s job should be to establish clear and reasonable rules, protect the public interest and then get out of the way. Instead, Canada has become a country where somebody can be prepared to invest billions of dollars, employ thousands of Canadians and develop resources that the world desperately wants, and the first question they have to ask is not whether the project makes economic sense but whether they will spend the next decade trying to navigate a Liberal regulatory system. That is not economic strategy. It is Liberal self-sabotage. The Liberals now say that Bill C-39 will create greater certainty and faster timelines, but Canadians should remember that these are almost the exact same promises and talking points we heard when Bill C-5 was introduced last year. If Bill C-5, more than a year ago, was supposed to get projects moving faster, why do we need Bill C-39? The Prime Minister said Canada would move at speeds not seen in generations. Canadians looked around and waited, for the past year and a half. They waited for the new mines, the new pipelines and the new energy infrastructure. They waited for the new ports and the new major private sector projects that would create thousands of jobs and attract billions of dollars of investment. They are still waiting. The Liberal Prime Minister promised speeds not seen in generations, and instead, Canadians have received delays not seen in generations. Eighteen months later, the Liberals are asking Canadians to believe that the problem was simply that they needed another 250 pages of federal legislation. Canadians are entitled to be skeptical. The issue has never been that Ottawa lacks enough power, regulations, departments, bureaucrats or pieces of paper. The issue is that the government has spent more than a decade making it harder to build anything in the country. Bill C-69 created enormous uncertainty for major projects. Bill C-48 restricted Canada’s ability to export our energy resources from the coast of British Columbia. Layers of Liberal federal legislation overlap with provincial processes. Project proponents face years of consultations, studies, assessments and bureaucratic demands before they know whether they will receive a final answer. While all that is happening, capital, both domestic and foreign, does not simply sit around waiting for Ottawa. It moves, and it goes somewhere. It goes to jurisdictions where governments understand that regulatory certainty matters, where permits can be obtained in a predictable period of time and where political leaders actually want investment rather than merely talk about wanting investment. Every time that happens, Canada loses more investment. We lose jobs. We lose construction jobs, engineering jobs and manufacturing jobs, and we lose tax revenues that could help pay for health care and public services. Canadian families lose opportunities for the good-paying jobs that once allowed an income to support a family, buy a home and build the future. This is why Conservatives keep coming back to a very basic principle: one project, one review. The government should not require a company to repeatedly prove the same thing to different levels of government, different departments and different regulators. They should streamline the processes and get out of the way. This brings us to a broader question before us, which is what kind of country Canada intends to become. We possess almost every natural advantage imaginable. We have some of the largest energy reserves in the world. We have critical minerals that our allies desperately need. We have enormous agricultural capacity. We have forestry, energy, uranium, natural gas and oil. We have access to three oceans. We have some of the most talented workers and entrepreneurs anywhere on the planet. Canada should be one of the richest countries in the world. There is no reason Canadians should have to accept economic stagnation, declining investment and fewer opportunities as if these things are somehow inevitable. They are not inevitable. They are consequences of Liberal choices. Canada has everything we need to succeed here at home. What we need now is a government willing to get out of the way. The Liberals promised Canadians that we would build at speeds not seen in generations. Well, they were right about one thing. Canadians have not seen us build this slowly in generations. Canadians have had enough announcements, enough Liberal studies and enough delays. It is time to get out of the way and finally let Canada build.”

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“Armed criminals recently broke into a home in my community and shot a gun. Weak Liberal bail rules let dangerous criminals out of jail too easily. I want the government to make bail harder to get so violent criminals stay in prison.”

“Mr. Speaker, earlier this month in Richmond Hill, multiple armed suspects forced their way into a family home, assaulted the residents and opened fire in the house with a gun. Families in my community should not have to wake up wondering whether violent armed criminals will be kicking down their door next. After years of Liberal soft-on-crime policies, it is arrest by day and bail by night. All Canadians are hearing is plenty of Liberal talk, but no results. When will the Liberals keep Canadians safe and repeal weak Liberal bail, house arrest and catch-and-release to lock up extortionists, human traffickers, car thieves, burglars and violent criminals?”

In response to a question from Steven Bonk

“Canada cannot keep borrowing and running deficits forever. The government must balance its budget and reward hard work instead of bureaucracy.”

“Mr. Speaker, history is full of governments that believed deficits did not matter, until they suddenly did. History is full of administrations that were convinced they could borrow indefinitely because markets were patient, until they were not. Canada is not exempt from arithmetic. Debt must be serviced, confidence must be earned and budgets must eventually reconcile aspirations with reality. We need to live in a Canada that does not reward bureaucracy, but rewards hard work. The Liberals like to live in press releases, but Canadians live in reality.”

In response to a question from Mario Beaulieu

“Life is too expensive and housing costs too much because of this government. Surveys show many Canadians cannot afford food or their bills. The government needs to use Conservative ideas to fix this.”

“Mr. Speaker, when I speak to my constituents, a lot of the concerns they talk about have to do with the affordability crisis and the housing hell the Liberal government has created after 11 years in power. Some Liberals will say that is a conspiracy theory, but the United Way released a recent survey that says 60% of Canadians feel anxiety about their personal finances; 38% face food insecurity, with one in five reporting that all of the food in their home had been eaten and there was no money left to buy more; 40% lose sleep over how they will stretch their paycheque; 34% know someone close to them has experienced poverty; and 22% have personally experienced poverty. Those are the stats, but some Liberal members will have us believe they are a conspiracy. It is time for the Liberals to get out of the way and adopt Conservative solutions.”

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In response to a question from John-Paul Danko

“The Liberals have ruined Canada's economy. Compared to other top countries, we have the highest household debt, the most expensive housing, the worst grocery price increases, and very high unemployment.”

“Mr. Speaker, what is embarrassing is the Liberals’ record. What have they done? Let us look at their record. The macroeconomic results are devastating. We have the highest household debt in the G7, the most unaffordable housing in the G7, the lowest investment per worker in the G7, the second-lowest productivity in the G7, the second-highest unemployment in the G7 and the worst food inflation in the G7. Was that the promise my Liberal colleague made to his constituents in the election campaign?”

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“I do not support this budget bill. The government is borrowing and spending too much money, which causes inflation and higher debt. Their accounting hides real costs and creates useless bureaucracies instead of building homes and infrastructure.”

“Mr. Speaker, when historians study the fiscal decline of nations, they often note that collapse rarely begins with a dramatic event. It begins with habits: habits of indiscipline, habits of euphemism, habits of pretending that borrowing is prosperity, that inflationary spending is strategy and that accounting definitions can be stretched indefinitely without consequence. This Liberal so-called spring economic update is not merely an illustration of Liberal-managed decline. It is not merely a Liberal rebranding exercise. It is a statement of Liberal governing philosophy, and that philosophy is simple: spend now, explain later, redefine terms when necessary and hope Canadians do not notice the bill until it arrives. Canadians do not need a Ph.D. in economics to notice that these Liberal habits are costing them. They notice the Liberal money-printing inflationary deficits at the grocery store. They notice the Liberal taxes at the gas pump. They notice when their children conclude that home ownership is no longer a Canadian expectation but a lottery ticket. They notice it when this Liberal Prime Minister is the only G20 leader to deliver his economy a recession. They notice when this Liberal Prime Minister lectures them about making more sacrifices while failing to exercise any restraint when adding billions more to the national credit card. In public economics, there is a concept known as “government failure”. It is the recognition that governments, especially when they are run by Liberals, are imperfect institutions. Similar to markets, they are subject to distorted incentives, information asymmetries, bureaucratic self-preservation and Liberal political opportunism. Liberal Bill C-30 is government failure bound in legislative form. This Liberal Prime Minister promised discipline. He promised prudence. He promised to spend less and invest more. Instead, in just over a year, this Liberal Prime Minister managed to nearly double the deficit left behind by the last Liberal Prime Minister. Think about that. After a decade of fiscal excess under one Liberal Prime Minister, another Liberal Prime Minister arrived promising sobriety and immediately ordered another round at the bar. That is not renewal. That is relapse. The Liberals call this investment, but Canadians know it as credit card budgeting. When a household continually puts ordinary expenses on a credit card, not because of emergency, not because of catastrophe, but because of chronic overspending, that household is not building wealth. It is mortgaging its future. The same principle applies to nations, yet the Liberal government behaves as though fiscal arithmetic has been repealed. In academic public finance, debt sustainability matters because interest compounds, fiscal flexibility narrows and eventually governments lose the ability to respond to genuine crises. The independent fiscal watchdog, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, has once again raised the alarm. The PBO warns that this Liberal abandonment of traditional definitions of capital spending continues to undermine transparency. It is not a trivial accounting disagreement. It goes to the heart of the fiscal integrity of this Liberal government. Capital spending traditionally implies that the creation of productive assets occur, things that generate future economic value, public utility or measurable returns, or things like infrastructure, such as a new road or a new hospital. However, when Liberal accounting definitions become elastic, everything all of a sudden becomes capital. When everything becomes capital, nothing is. The PBO has explicitly stated that the lack of definitions prevents this Liberal Prime Minister from ensuring that the Liberal government’s fiscal anchor remains balanced. In essence, the independent officer charged with scrutinizing public finances cannot determine whether this Liberal government’s own numbers mean what the government claims they mean. That should alarm every member of the House. It is not only the PBO. The International Monetary Fund, the IMF, a global agency that the Liberals love to cite, has now called on Canada to adopt international accounting standards to improve transparency, ensure comparability over time and maintain a clear connection between borrowing and debt. Why? It is because this Liberal government’s current fiscal presentation no longer inspires confidence. When both the Parliamentary Budget Officer and the International Monetary Fund are warning that our accounting lacks transparency, this is not a partisan talking point. It becomes a credibility crisis, and credibility matters. In public choice theory, governments, especially like this Liberal government, are not assumed to act as neutral benevolent maximizers of public welfare. Rather, they respond to incentives. Liberal politicians prefer spending money today while shifting costs tomorrow through higher taxes, higher inflation, higher deficits and higher interest costs. Liberal bureaucracies seek budget maximization at the expense of taxpayers, who are often deprived of any input by their Liberal governments. Liberal insider interest groups seek concentrated benefits, siphoning money from public coffers while dispersing costs across everyday Canadians. This Liberal spring fiscal update reflects every one of those pathologies. The PBO also warned that repeated spending increases beyond previous projections will “erode the credibility of fiscal plans and weaken confidence in the fiscal framework and raise concerns about long-term [debt] sustainability.” That is the exact credibility crisis that this Liberal Prime Minister finds himself in, because a fiscal anchor that moves whenever politically inconvenient is not an anchor at all. It is driftwood. What is the consequence? It is higher costs, higher debt and higher inflation, but maybe that is the new world order that this Liberal Prime Minister wants Canadians to live in. Canadians are now paying $59 billion annually in debt interest. The PBO projects that this could rise to $80 billion by the decade’s end, which is 13% of federal revenues. That is approximately $1,900 per Canadian every year. It is not for hospitals, roads, defence or housing. It is just to service the interest on yesterday’s Liberal excess. Every Canadian family is effectively paying thousands of dollars merely to keep the Liberal debt machine running, and the debt interest now exceeds federal health transfers and the revenues collected from the GST. Canadians pay taxes only to watch that money routed not into services but into servicing the debt for prior Liberal overspending. That is not one of the so-called progressive policies the Liberals love to tout. That is intergenerational extraction. There is another glaring black hole in this update: infrastructure spending. The Liberals have made commitments, but the Liberal spring economic update provides no year-by-year breakdown by department on infrastructure spending. It provides only Liberal press releases about so-called investments and maybe a top-line dollar commitment. That is Liberal rhetoric for, “This could blow a hole in the nation’s finances and we have no way of tracking where the money is going.” In the accounting world, this is called deferred disclosure, and it takes me to my next point. The Liberal Major Projects Office was heralded with great fanfare, but where are the progress reports on the infrastructure? Where are the timelines? Where are the approvals on the projects? The PBO notes the absence of public reporting. The Liberal government has allocated hundreds of millions of tax dollars for so-called project acceleration, yet it has provided zero clarity. It is no wonder that this office has been described as the “mostly photo ops” office. The only thing we know is that this brand new bureaucracy is staffed with Liberal insiders and executives who are collecting salaries as high as $700,000 a year. This reflects a classic principal-agent problem. Taxpayers are the principals, while Liberal government institutions and their corporate insiders are the agents. When agents face weak accountability, asymmetric information and vague mandates, they optimize for process and motion, rather than outcomes and results. That is what we see with the Liberal mostly photo ops office. We see Liberal bureaucratic expansion without measurable performance, Liberal administrative theatre without delivery and Liberal insiders getting rich off executive salaries that could reach close to $1 million per year in some cases. The Liberal housing hell is another prime example of this. After 11 years of failure, Canadians might have hoped for some urgency. Instead, even after allocating $13 billion to the so-called Build Canada Homes, the PBO projects that just 5,200 units will be built annually. In an unprecedented national, made-by-Liberal housing crisis, the PBO explicitly stated that this is “insufficient” to meet the previously targeted pace. If we recall, the Liberal Prime Minister promised 500,000 homes per year during the campaign, but his own brand new housing bureaucracy can build only 1% of his stated target. Housing starts continue to lose momentum and there are no specific metrics, no pace targets and no credible plan. We have the most unaffordable housing market in the G7. The Liberal government offers nothing but bureaucracy in place of home building. Public economics teaches that regulatory barriers distort supply. When governments create friction through permitting delays, duplicative approvals and antidevelopment frameworks, prices rise. The answer is not endless, unconditional taxpayer subsidies layered atop supply constraints. Those merely inflate demand against an artificially limited supply. The answer is to remove those governmental barriers and let builders build, yet the Liberals persist in governance through announcements, rhetoric and blocking, rather than execution. We arrive at the newest Liberal fantasy, which is the so-called sovereign wealth fund with no wealth. It is an office to prepare for a future press release to eventually borrow money, at the expense of taxpayers, to fund and siphon into politically charged investments. The Liberals already have the Infrastructure Bank, the growth fund and the defence bank. They have agency after agency, fund after fund and office after office, and the result is that Canada still has the worst investment performance in the G7. This is textbook government failure. If a project has a viable business case, capital markets will invest in it. Private investors will fund productive ventures. If a business case does not exist, taxpayers should not be conscripted into subsidizing political vanity. Instead, we get what public choice theory would call rent-seeking. Politically connected actors position themselves around state capital allocation, all while consultants, advisers, insiders, transition offices, boards and task forces take out their straws and siphon off their share of taxpayer money. The beneficiaries are concentrated and the costs are diffused. That is how inefficient states grow, and Canadians can see it and feel it. Canadians deserve better. They deserve an affordable government so that they can have an affordable life, honest accounting, discipline, prosperity and a government that understands the basic truth of economics. A nation cannot borrow and block its way into lasting prosperity.”