Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, the government talks about elbows up, Canada strong, building Canada strong, spending less to invest more, it being time to build, building a Canada people can afford, the strongest economy in the G7, a new Liberal government, the best possible deal for Canadians, building together, the true North strong and free, giving ourselves far more than the Americans can take away, and the idea that no deal is better than a bad deal. Now it talks about being masters of our destiny. The government by sound bite is killing us. We have got to get past this and actually get to some serious governance in the House of Commons and across the country as well. This is just complete inanity going forward. Budgets are documents about choices the government has to make going forward about how it balances society’s interests. The Liberals have turned from those actual budgets to tome-sized documents about all the great things they are going to do for Canadians. In that actual revolution of what the document was supposed to be and what it has become for the sound bite-obsessed Liberals on the other side of the House has been just nuts. There are 510 pages of what they want to do, and about how they are going to be all things to all people. It is just a bunch of words the Liberals put together to try to impress a whole bunch of people and get some special interests onside. I know that there are a whole bunch of things in the budget for a whole bunch of people all the way across the country, and businesses are going to jump at the chance, because we are becoming much less of a democratic society and much more of a government-knows-best, centrally planned economy society. I think there are a lot of people who, if they take a look at that long-term, are going to actually worry about where it started and how we got here. It is escalating, and we notice the way the government is actually moving further in this direction. The thing about budgets is that they are sacred documents about choices we have to make going forward, no matter where we are. It lays out the things we can do and the things we cannot do. However, the Liberal government has consistently shown that it has not had to pay the price for ramping up deficit after deficit. That is the way it has been since 2015, when it was supposed to run short deficits for a short period of time. At that point in time, Canadians were still of the mind that the government had to balance the budget. There is a reckoning at some point in time for spending tomorrow’s taxpayers’ dollars today. I am sure members will recall when the Liberals under former prime minister Jean Chrétien had to make a fundamental choice for Canadians. They had to cut health care funding and university funding across Canada. It used to be that 50¢ per dollar was paid by the federal government, before the mid-1990s when the Chrétien government had to make extreme cuts in order to get back to balance. The International Monetary Fund had said that the Canadian government could no longer pay its bills and could risk not being able to pay even the interest on its bills, which had escalated to about 40% of our collective taxes at that point in time. The Liberals had to make severe tax cuts very quickly, and that meant they stopped transferring funds to the provinces. It was the easy way to do it. That was the biggest federal expenditure. There is an overlap between what the provinces should pay for and what the federal government should pay for. The Chrétien Liberals made the unsavoury decision they had to make: They cut the spending they gave to provinces. As a result, our health care system faltered. The provinces had to spend more of their resources on health care over the next decade in order to try to deliver a health care system that Canadians used to be able to count on. That is about choices. We have to recognize where these choices have to go. It is not about being all things to all people. The cost of this is billions of dollars foisted upon a different generation. Literally, now it is hundreds of billions of dollars. Let me explain that, because it is not immediately clear in the budget what the Liberals have done. The Prime Minister is very financially astute. He has played around with balance sheets and income statements in his previous life. Now he is doing that with the Government of Canada, the Government of Canada’s balance sheet and the Government of Canada’s income statement. The Liberal government and the previous Liberal government came up with several debt metrics along the way, such as the debt-to-GDP ratio and the deficit-to-GDP ratio. It kept missing these targets all along the way. If the Liberals are going to keep missing their targets, their so-called anchors, the best thing to do is to change the definitions of what those anchors are. If we look at what we actually carry in debt in this country right now, we see that there is interest-bearing debt outstanding for Canada, over $1.5 trillion that we owe debt on around the world. That is just the Government of Canada. The provincial governments owe a lot more as well, but more than $1.5 trillion is owed, and we pay interest on that. Currently we are paying about $60 billion a year of interest on the more than $1.5 trillion of interest-paying debt. That is going to go up over the next five years by $765 billion. The government can talk about investing versus operational deficits. That is garbage. There is and always has been a way to account for this. The Liberals are obfuscating the fact that they are going to increase the country’s borrowings on international markets by 50% over the next five years and pay interest on that, with 85.5 billion taxpayer dollars going toward interest. That is obscene. To try to hide that in the budget document by changing the definitions is chicanery of the highest order. I call out the government on that because the Liberals have to be more transparent with Canadians about what they are actually causing for future generations of Canadians. The government is spending like there is no tomorrow. I am going to give an example. According to the spring economic update, the amount the government is going to have to borrow over the next five years was only $668 billion. Since then, that number has gone up by almost $100 billion, which we in this country are going to have to borrow and pay interest on. Do we think this is a problem, including going forward, when we are not going to be able to pay our interest on the amount that is outstanding, which Canadians owe on the world markets? I do not know what the endgame is here for the Liberals, but we are piling unsustainable debt onto Canadians’ backs. I hear my colleagues across the way talk about how there is a crisis in the world so we have to spend like there is no tomorrow. I have been a member of the House for seven years, and I cannot say how many times the Liberals have said that we need to blow our brains out because there is a crisis. There have been two legitimate crises in the last two decades: the financial crisis in 2008 and the pandemic we went through, but now the Liberals are addicted to throwing money out the door, and they continue to throw it out the door more and more. There are always good reasons to throw money at people. The people receiving it think it is a great thing. However, the people spending it are not going to be happy when they get the bill at the end of the day, when it becomes more transparent about what actually is being spent and how they are not going to be able to pay the bills down the road, the taxes that future generations of Canadians have to pay. That is the price the government is exacting from Canadians at this point in time. I am going to talk a little about democracy. Democracy matters in this country. My colleague referred earlier to how the government continues to roll this out the door. The budget that was just presented is the budget for 2026-27, a fiscal year that ends in five months. That is great. The Liberals have just given us a budget seven months late. They are seven months late to deliver a budget for the current fiscal year. This is not normal. The Liberals pretended this was normal coming out of an election, but this is not normal for the way the country is to run. Throughout the summer and throughout the intervening period, the government has spun money out and has made announcement after announcement, and now a bunch of that money-spinning appears in the budget. This is not democracy. This is not the way one sets a budget for Canadians and gets it passed in the House of Commons. All those announcements the Liberals made all through the summer, where they chucked money out the door, are now in a budget that says this is what they are going to spend this year. As I say, the spring economic update said we would have to borrow an additional $668 billion over five years. They now finally present the budget, and it is $775 billion to borrow over the next five years, a ludicrous amount of money. Again, though, there are no anchors, no guardrails whatsoever. It is a government with no guidelines whatsoever. It just wants to spend money. There has to be an end to this. I hope that end happens before Canadians realize that they are at the end of their rope, because many Canadians are at the end of their rope financially, and that we actually get some sanity back into the way we deliver the finances of this country.
