“The government is borrowing far too much money, and the interest on our debt is rising fast. That drives up inflation and puts our public services at risk. The government has broken every spending rule it set for itself. It must commit to balancing the budget soon.”

“Mr. Speaker, I would like to inform the House before I begin that I will be splitting my time today with my esteemed colleague from Vaughan—Woodbridge. I am happy to share time with him. Today, we are going to talk about the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report. I agree with parts of it. The House will hear my critiques of parts of it as well, because all of this is open to debate. I hope my colleagues across the way will listen to some of this debate on how we forge our direction in Canada economically going forward. I will quote from the report: PBO anticipates that federal borrowing will grow significantly faster than deficits, which are measured on an accrual basis. Over the next five years, cumulative deficits are projected to total $333.3 billion, whereas federal borrowing is projected to rise by $732.9 billion.... Let us look at the delta there, the change, if we can. There is over $400 billion more in borrowing than deficits. This is a partial result of what the financial wizards on the other side of the House are bringing to Canadian federal government budgeting. It is a whole bunch of cash out the door that Canadians have to pay interest on without it looking like debt. This is the issue about investments versus spending. They have changed the way we look at debt and deficits in Canada and have categorized them differently. Nevertheless, the number Canadians need to worry about is the amount of interest they are paying on that debt. That number has gone from $24 billion a year in 2020, around when I first came to the House in 2019, up to $59 billion this year and $83 billion in four years’ time. Let us think about that escalation of debt. That escalation of debt is two things: It is more money we are paying interest on, but it is also a higher rate of interest. The Parliamentary Budget Officer illustrates clearly that the stress we have on the debt and the amount in bonds outstanding are going to cause Canada to start paying a higher interest rate. It is right in the report. We can talk about our AAA rating, but the fact is, because we are borrowing so much, we will have to start paying a higher rate of interest. It is not just more interest on more debt and more debt, but a higher rate of interest as well. This is what we call a waterfall. This is going to continue to impact Canadians. It is $83 billion at the federal level alone. If we take a look at all the debt in Canada in U.S. dollars, we have about $4.6 trillion in debt across the nation. This puts us as one of the most indebted nations in the world. This is a problem. It is a combination of consumer debt, corporate debt and government debt. The government always tries to say that our debt-to-GDP ratio is only 40% plus, but let me say that that is an illusion, because government debt in this country is not just federal government debt; it is federal government debt plus provincial government debt. The amount of debt that provincial governments are in collectively across the country is about $1 trillion. If we add up the debt, not the amount outstanding, of $1.6 trillion at the federal level and $1 trillion at the provincial level, plus the massive amount of debt that consumers and corporations have outstanding, we have a massive wall of debt in Canada that is almost the worst in the world. There comes a point in time when this becomes a problem and we have to start addressing it. That time is right on our horizon, because interest rates are starting to rise. Not only are they going to rise for the federal government, making it pay more money, but they also going to rise for consumers, who are going to have to start paying more for their mortgages and more for their consumer debt. They are also going to start rising for corporations, which will have to cut back because they are paying more in interest and have less money to invest, as the Prime Minister likes to say. Let us look at the $83 billion in debt interest, which is ridiculous. When Canadians ask why we cannot fix health care, I am going to bring them back to the Jean Chrétien years. I remember the Mulroney years when we talked about an operating balance. Brian Mulroney was a very good prime minister, in my opinion, and he got us to a point where we had an operating balance. We still had a huge amount of debt we were paying, but we had an operating balance. This is where the current government pretends it wants to go, although it is very selective about what it uses in the numbers in the operating balance. The Parliamentary Budget Officer’s job is to assess the government against its performance, but a lot of the numbers are now hidden. I am glad she points out the accrual basis and the extra $400 billion in borrowing under the government’s new way of accounting for these programs. It is a mirage. We have to get ahead of this. This $80 billion a year in debt interest payments is far too much for Canada. That is $2,000, give or take, per person in Canada, not per family. For a family of four, $8,000 goes out the door before they even see it. Most families in Canada are probably not paying $8,000 in taxes, but that is going out the door whether they like it or not. Everybody is behind, not counting their personal debt as well. What effect does this have on the economy? It causes inflation. If we look at what the Parliamentary Budget Officer says in this report, she talks about the reduction in real GDP growth, to 0.9% in this economy. The nominal is 5.4%. What is the difference? It is called the GDP gross domestic product deflator, which is 4.6%. If anybody tells us the interest is only 3% or 2.5% in Canada, then why is the GDP deflator, which is a proxy for inflation, at 4.6%? If we measured these things, as they are real and affect people’s lives, we would understand the pain that Canadians are feeling right now, as opposed to hiding behind a bunch of numbers. Let me correct the Parliamentary Budget Officer, because she buys into this mirage of what net debt is. When the government describes its net debt, what it is doing is taking hundreds of billions of dollars of pensioners’ assets and saying that it is the government’s asset. It is not the government’s asset; it is the pensioners’ asset. The government should tell Canadians directly that when things get rough, because things are going to get rough with our financial situation, it is going to reach in there, grab some of their pension earnings and put them on its balance sheet, because the bankers across the world we owe interest to are expecting us to do that. If that is part of the arrangement, the government needs to make it clear to Canadians that their pensions, and Quebeckers’ pensions, which are not managed by the same management team, are on the table for the government to use. That is how it calculates its debt-to-GDP ratio. It is dishonest, unless the government has some arrangement with the Canada pension plan behind the scenes to make that happen. What makes this even more troubling is that Canadians were promised fiscal discipline by the very well-educated Prime Minister. We have to acknowledge that he is a well-trained economist. However, the results we are getting from this well-trained economist are anything but good. If he is hiding the numbers in different balance sheets and raising the debt that Canadians have to pay, he is not performing as expected. Canadians were promised fiscal anchors. There is not one fiscal anchor, in the seven years I have been here, that the government has stuck to. It keeps making things up as it goes along. Even the Parliamentary Budget Officer in her report has said that it is not going to meet its fiscal anchors. When are we going to say enough is enough? It has no fiscal discipline whatsoever. An economist like the Prime Minister must understand our debt position in the world. He must understand that he is visiting inflation upon Canada. He must understand the cliff we are getting to as far as our outstanding debt in this country goes, including in the provinces. Commitments are made to balance the budget. Commitments are made to get back to fiscal discipline in this country. None of them have been met. If anybody has been watching over the last several months, even though the government set itself a $60-billion-plus deficit, it has continued to make announcement after announcement as if money is no object. If money is no object to our Prime Minister and he thinks he can continue to keep spending, making announcements and blowing $40 billion here and $50 billion there without any consequences, then we have to go back to the drawing board and figure out what exactly is going to happen. I will tell members what happened when Jean Chrétien had to deal with the debt. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien had to cut payments to the provinces. The result of those cuts to the provinces is that they had to adjust their health care spending, and health care was cut across Canada. That was the result of a choice that that government had to make because it was fiscally off base. The debt had gotten too high in Canada. We are approaching that position again. When I ran for this position, a key consideration was to get this country back to balance. We need to get back to balance. Will the government commit to getting us there sooner rather than later?”

“The government printed about 600 billion extra dollars during COVID, and that caused high inflation. The cost of living is now the worst it has been in a generation, and the government is hiding it by cooking the books. I want the member to explain how these dishonest accounting tricks hurt struggling Canadians.”

“Mr. Speaker, when the Prime Minister was the governor of the Bank of England, he had a fancy for printing money. We know that the Trudeau government’s response to COVID was to print money. Some $600 billion of extra currency was printed in Canada. Now we are starting to see the effects of that through inflation. When we see the government trying to use creative accounting practices to cook the books in its favour, I am wondering if the member could explain a bit more the problems that it creates for Canadians, who are really struggling with the cost of living crisis, because opposite to what the government claims, affordability is the worst it has been in a generation.”

“Too much government spending and debt cause high inflation and higher interest rates. This makes life unfair. People who already own things get richer, while others cannot afford to buy a home until much later in life.”

“Mr. Speaker, the issue is that there is one pool of money in the world but a whole bunch of people dipping into it. As I pointed out, in Canada we have federal government debt, we have provincial government debt, we have consumer debt and we have corporate debt. All of these are in the same debt pool, so when there is a risk, it all goes up. When it all goes up, inflation happens. Inflation is going to happen as far as the expenses go on interest, but when the government excessively spends and runs huge deficits, it causes massive inflation in the economy, asset inflation in particular. One of the reasons we have what is called a K-shaped economy in Canada right now is that people who have assets have seen those assets inflate. People without those assets have gone without, so those people are waiting in line for a home that is going to take far longer to build. They cannot enter the housing market for a much longer period of time, into their mid-thirties and forties now, when it used to be in their mid-twenties and early thirties. This is a problem. This is the cause of inflation. This is a result of governments spending too much and thinking that somebody down the road will pay the bill. That is not going to happen.”

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“The government should not spend public money on LNG Canada. Projects like this do not need tax dollars, and private companies built the first phase without them. The government is pushing out real business investment and wasting money, and it needs to stop.”

“Mr. Speaker, that opens up a good avenue for me to talk about. LNG Canada should not require any government investment. Quite frankly, LNG one did not require any government investment. LNG two should not require any government investment. What the Government of Canada is doing right now, under the Liberal Prime Minister, is effectively replacing private sector investment with government investment. It is inflated. It is not getting anything done particularly well, as far as what they call investment goes, if there is no test to it. Frankly, it is displacing the investment that should be happening in our economy rather than adding to it. It has to stop. We have to get the private sector back on track.”

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“The government is spending too much money and borrowing too much. This is making life harder for Canadians, and we are spending billions just to pay interest on the national debt. I want the Prime Minister to come to the finance committee to answer questions about how he will cut spending and get the deficit under control.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise today on behalf of the wonderful people in the great riding of Vaughan—Woodbridge. Canadians have been told for years that Ottawa needs to spend more to make their lives better, yet every time Conservatives in the House raise the affordability crisis, we are met with the same response from the Liberal government: another list of programs, another spending announcement and billions more dollars in borrowed money. Why is the measure of success for the Liberal government always how much money it spends, not tonnes produced, businesses opened or even jobs created? We constantly hear from the Prime Minister and the Liberals that they are not spending but are investing. We have been hearing this for almost 11 years at this point, and I think it is time we ask a very fair question. For most Canadians, for Canadians watching at home, is their life any better today? Despite all the announcements, all the billions of dollars in allocated funds, has their life marginally improved at all? Canadians are struggling to afford groceries. I hear from young people all the time in my riding and across this country who say they have almost given up on the dream of home ownership. They find it increasingly expensive. There is a report out of the Bank of Canada on the brain drain that is happening here. Young people are moving to different jurisdictions such as the United States in order to find employment due to cost of living constraints. Just last week, Food Banks Canada reported 2.35 million food bank visits in a single month, an increase of 117% since 2019. The CEO of Food Banks Canada says this is: the story of what happens when millions of people are running out of options. In the past, most people in Canada could absorb a small financial setback... Those days are over. Canada’s bleak new reality is that millions of people are making impossible trade-offs every day as they choose between food or rent. A statement such as that should alarm every single member of the chamber. Taking all this into account, it is hard to even fathom that the Prime Minister had the audacity to stand up in this place and say, “Affordability is the best it has been in...a decade.” These are not me putting words in his mouth; those were his words. However, I would not blame him. After all, he is only the Prime Minister of Canada, and as a matter of fact, colleagues, he just got here. Well, he has been Prime Minister for almost two years at this point, and at some point he has to take responsibility for the country he is governing. We are beginning to see a very familiar pattern with the Prime Minister: He tells Canadians one thing, but his record demonstrates something that is very different. His promise to get federal spending under control is one example. How often have we heard the Prime Minister state boldly that the Liberals are going to spend less and invest more? I know he just got here, but surely a year and a half is enough time to explain how he intends to keep that promise he made to Canadians. Last week, the Parliamentary Budget Officer released her latest assessment of the government’s finances, and the numbers raised some serious questions. Allow me to list just a few of the PBO’s findings. This is sourced from a CTV news article: The PBO released her latest economic forecast on Tuesday, which is projecting slower growth in the country’s real GDP forecast... The outlook also spells trouble for the federal government’s debt, and the cost of servicing that debt, projecting a growing debt-to-GDP ratio in the coming years. Declining deficit-to-GDP ratio is one of the federal government’s [own] fiscal anchors. But, according to [the] PBO..., the charges to service the debt is “the fastest-growing piece of government spending right now.” When the Prime Minister tells Canadians his government is going to spend less, I think they are entitled to ask exactly what he means by this. There is simply no factual evidence to support that he is spending less, as he claimed time and time again that he would. In fact, he is spending so much more. It is not just the size of the deficit that should concern Canadians. It is all those years of borrowing and what exactly that is now costing us. Five years ago, Ottawa spent $24.5 billion servicing the national debt. This year, that bill is projected to rise to $59.3 billion. In four years from now, that is going to climb to a whopping $83 billion. That is 13.6¢ for every dollar of federal revenue. It is a number so big that the human brain can barely even conceptualize what that is or just how massive it is. At a time when Canadians are struggling to access health care, the government is now projected to spend more on debt-servicing interest than it transfers to provinces and territories through the Canada health transfer. I ask the House and Canadians watching at home, what does that money actually provide? I will say what it does not do. It certainly does not shorten the wait times Canadians are facing to see their doctor. For a family of four, this year’s federal interest bill will cost each family $6,000. Canadians are being asked to live within their means by a government that has yet to explain exactly how it is going to live within its means. Next Thursday, the finance minister is going to come to the House, stand here and deliver yet another federal budget. I think we should all take note, and Canadians watching at home should certainly be well aware, of the timing of the introduction of that budget, which is the Thursday before the break week, to limit accountability and scrutiny of the budget, which will raise some serious questions about what we will find in that budget when we get to dig into it. I would love to be proven wrong on all this, but judging by all the metrics, including what the PBO said recently, all roads lead to Canadians’ having a very good reason to be concerned about what is in the fiscal budget this year. The Liberal government’s answer to nearly every problem seems to be to spend more money. Where does that money come from? It certainly does not grow on trees. It certainly does not come from Santa Claus. It comes directly from Canadians, either through taxes they pay today or through the borrowing that taxpayers will have to service for years down the road. The government continues to mortgage the future of my kids and the kids of every single Canadian watching at home today. There is something else in the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report that Canadians should hear before the budget is released. Excluding new announcements, total revenues are $9.2 billion higher, on average, over the next five years. Much of that comes from higher prices, particularly for oil and other commodities, which have boosted the federal tax revenue. In fact, the PBO has actually lowered their forecast for economic growth this year. While Canadians are dealing with higher prices and a slowing economy, Ottawa and the Liberal government are collecting more revenue than previously expected. What happened to all that additional revenue? The government has announced new spending and tax measures, costing some $52.6 billion over the same five years. I am sure the government will tell us how important each and every single one of those measures is. If the Prime Minister’s promise is to spend less and get the deficit under control, should we not at least expect some improvement in the country’s finances when the additional revenues come in? Instead, the PBO is projecting that the deficit will reach $70.2 billion next year. That is before we have even seen what the government plans to announce in next Thursday’s budget. We also keep hearing that the government is going to balance the operating budget. It is the government itself that decides what constitutes operating or capital expenses, and it does so quite arbitrarily, might I add. This leaves open the possibility that the Liberals move an expense from one category into another, simply to say that they have reduced or eliminated the operating budget. According to the PBO, spending on capital expenditures is far outpacing the deficit. This is why Canadians should be very concerned about this classification issue. Federal borrowing is expected to rise by $732 billion, while the cumulative deficit will be $333 billion over a five-year period. For Canadians, I come back to the question I have been asking throughout my this speech: Where is the Prime Minister’s plan to spend less? Canada is still running enormous deficits, debt interest is growing significantly and the Parliamentary Budget Officer now projects that the government will miss its own commitment to maintain a declining debt-to-GDP ratio. Which spending is being reduced? When will Canadians see the deficit brought under control? How does the Prime Minister intend to stop interest from consuming more money than they send to Ottawa? This is why the Prime Minister’s image as a banker seems to be collapsing and he needs to come to the finance committee to answer these very serious questions.”

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“I want the Prime Minister to come speak to the finance committee. Canada's finances are getting worse fast, according to the budget officer. The Prime Minister is an economist, so he should answer our questions about the government's record.”

“Mr. Speaker, absolutely we would love to see the finance minister at the finance committee as well. I know he will be coming to the finance committee when the budget is introduced. However, given the state of the fiscal position we are in, the PBO’s own assessment that was released recently and the fact that the Prime Minister of this country is a trained economist who ran on his image as a banker, as somebody who understands the fiscal conditions of this country, these conditions are deteriorating rapidly. If he is the man, he is the man to answer the questions, so he should come to the finance committee, address the committee and let Canadians know exactly what is going on with this fiscal position and the government’s record.”

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“The Prime Minister is the least open and accountable leader I have seen. He rarely shows up to answer questions, and he talks to foreign media instead of Canadian reporters. Also, the government spends money on large projects without spending limits or knowing the final cost.”

“Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. I would like to start by saying that the Prime Minister is probably the least accountable and least transparent prime minister I have witnessed in my lifetime. My colleague mentioned question period appearances, which are severely lacking in the chamber, but I would also say that we notice, as the Prime Minister goes around, that most of his announcements are actually made in foreign media, not here in the press galley to Canadian media. Where is the transparency? Where is the accountability? I am sure members of the media and the Canadian public would like to hear much more about the Prime Minister and his plans announced right here on Canadian soil. With respect to big projects such as Alto’s, I will say that it seems the government does not have a ceiling on these projects. It cannot demonstrate profitability, and we do not know what they are ultimately going to cost.”

“I want my colleague to name a few ways the Liberal government could cut federal spending and control its budget.”

“Mr. Speaker, my colleague’s speech was excellent. I would like to ask a very simple question: Could the member think of just a few ways the Liberal government could lower federal spending to get its budget under control?”

“We have already shown $200 billion in government spending that we could cut today. We could cut foreign aid, outside consultants, and wasteful projects that do not deliver results. We should cut this spending and use the money for better projects instead.”

“Mr. Speaker, we have already outlined some $200 billion in spending that we could eliminate today. For instance, we could eliminate foreign aid. We could eliminate costly projects, such as the Alto project, that are just going to cost us a totally inappropriate amount of money without delivering results for Canadians. We can talk about all the consultants that the government has spent money on over time. Everywhere we look, we find misuse of funds. There are plenty of areas where we would see a place to cut spending so we could direct that money at better projects.”

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“The government is spending more on interest on its debt than on health care. By 2030, that interest will cost $83 billion, while health care transfers will only be $67 billion. Will the government promise that debt interest will never cost more than health care in future budgets?”

“Mr. Speaker, the government often says health care is a priority, yet the PBO shows that the debt servicing spending this year already exceeds the health transfers. By 2030, the debt servicing cost will hit $83 billion, while health care transfers are projected to only be $67 billion. Will the Liberal government commit that no future budget will allow the debt charges to exceed the Canadian health transfers?”