Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, I am glad to speak about the budget, but before I get into the details of the budget, it is important to put it in the context of the government and its legacy since 2015. In 2015, when the Liberals were first elected, they inherited a balanced budget with a $2-billion surplus. We had an economy wherein housing was affordable, where a normal family with proper jobs or a person with a proper job could save their money and buy a house, across Canada. We had a country that had a middle class described by the very liberal New York Times as the world’s most prosperous middle class. There were pipelines approved. The northern gateway pipeline to the Pacific coast on the shortest route to Asian export markets was approved. The Keystone XL pipeline was approved. The Trans Mountain expansion was on the horizon with a private sector proponent. The energy east pipeline was on the horizon, to be proposed by TransCanada. The Liberals blew it all. They immediately broke the promise they had made in the 2015 election to run only two years of modest deficits that would permit the budget to balance itself. They cancelled the northern gateway pipeline. They passed Bill C-48 to make sure it could never come back. They failed to champion Keystone XL. They chased the TransCanada pipeline out of Canada. The company changed its name to TC Energy and focused its investment activity in Mexico and the United States. They chased Kinder Morgan out of Canada and built the TMX at an extraordinary cost to the Canadian taxpayers. This is the legacy of the government: broken promises and expenditures. Minister Morneau repeatedly broke every fiscal promise. He declared this fiscal anchor of a declining debt-to-GDP ratio, as opposed to his election promise of a balanced budget, and then the Liberals blew through that promise and broke it repeatedly. His successor, Chrystia Freeland, in 2022 said that a declining debt-to-GDP ratio was “our fiscal anchor” and “a line we shall not cross” and that it could not be breached, in order to sustain their fiscal credibility. Two years after that, the promise was broken again. She resigned rather than table a budget with a $30-billion deficit. We were here when an unsigned budget was just dropped on the table without a speech. It was extraordinary. That was just two years ago. Following the resignation of Prime Minister Trudeau, the current Prime Minister promised in the election that elected his government that there would be a declining debt to GDP. The Liberals broke that promise immediately. The PBO, as recently as just this month, has said debt is the fastest-growing expense of the federal government, and that brings us to the budget, which we had yesterday. Before the budget, Conservatives had three asks. We asked for immediate relief for Canadian consumers who are unable to afford the high cost of living. We asked for the extension and removal of all taxes on fuel through to the spring, not just the excise tax but the whole range of federal impositions on the cost of fuel that make life unaffordable for Canadians. We asked the government to stop its wasteful spending, and the Liberals delivered a budget that contains 150 billion dollars’ worth of new spending. It is very difficult to follow the threads of their spending, as my colleague said before me, in this 500-page budget of confusing definitions and charts. We called upon the Liberals to rein in the spending so that interest does not end up choking out all other spending opportunities. Our third ask was that they return to their anchor, or at least their stated anchor, of declining debt to GDP. The anchors that have been cut loose and dropped to the bottom of the ocean by the government are astounding. There has never been a fiscal anchor that has held the government. The PBO said as much. The PBO’s report said there is no evidence that the stated fiscal anchors put any meaningful restraint on the government’s spending. Like a sailor, the Liberals buy an anchor. They do not tie it to the boat. They drop it overboard and realize that the boat is not being held. They go back to the chandler and buy another anchor, and everybody on the dock laughs at them. We ask that the government finally hold itself to a meaningful fiscal anchor. A declining debt-to-GDP ratio is an anchor. It is something, at least. However, for a government that began its tenure with a balanced budget, a true fiscal anchor, I would suggest, would leave the government with the ability to cope with international crises and national emergencies, which happen much more often than people think. It is quite reasonable to expect that once every 10 years or so, there will be a catastrophic global event that will require massive support from the government. That is why it should be balancing the budget in the meantime. In a time of a growing world economy, the government should be balancing its budget and leaving fiscal capacity to run deficits in times of national emergency, not simply as a matter of course. The government has added $750 billion to the national debt since members were elected in 2015. This budget proposes to add another $765 billion through to 2031. The Liberals have already given themselves extraordinary self-congratulations in their projection, claiming they will move up, by one year, the time at which they balance their so-called operating budget. What an utterly meaningless measurement of fiscal prudence that anchor is. It is rooted in accounting trickery wherein they can randomly choose how to classify their expenses in order to reduce whatever their so-called operating number would be and claim they have balanced it. Even the whole approach of meeting a fiscal anchor by something that is going to happen in the future is very typical of the government. It is always in the future, someday in some future year, going to deliver what it has promised today. This budget is very disappointing. It does not address any of the three important asks that opposition parliamentarians raised with the government: making life affordable for Canadians, reining in its wasteful spending, and establishing a somewhat serious fiscal anchor and to actually be held by that anchor. Therefore, this budget is a disappointment. It is, as the member for Wellington—Halton Hills North said earlier, an affront to Parliament that the government would table a budget that adds extraordinary amounts of debt that is non-budgetary. It is 500 pages long and very difficult to follow. The debt is accelerating faster than the deficits because of the way the government is accounting for its spending. This budget will not help make life more affordable for Canadians, it does not restore any type of fiscal discipline, and it leaves Canada vulnerable to future crises by eroding Canada’s fiscal capacity to deal with uncertainty in the future. We have been warning these Liberals for 11 years that their reckless spending will leave us where interest chokes out other spending priorities.
