Madam Speaker, I have listened to a number of speeches on this year's budget and on Bill C-47, the budget implementation act, at all stages of debate.
I have been inspired by some of these speeches. I really enjoyed the one delivered by the hon. member for Abbotsford. He spoke about the lines the Minister of Finance said last year she would not cross. It was about the increase in a ratio called the debt-to-GDP, or gross domestic product.
I agree with him completely. It seems as though the government, from so many of its ministries, tells Canadians what to expect from them and then ignores those seemingly brave words. It spoke of short-term deficits of $10 billion to bring us back to balance by 2019. I remember that one quite well. Then it spoke of a carbon tax that would never rise above $50 per tonne. That was in the 2019 election platform, not so long ago.
I love when the Liberals say, “We have got Canadians' backs.” What does that even mean? They say, “We are laser focused on solving this problem.” Sure. The one I like best is, “We are not worried about inflation. We are worried about deflation.” I think they would like to erase those words from the record at this point.
Talk is cheap in today's politics, until Canadians actually see the consequences of breaking the real pillars that hold up our country's financial well-being. There will be reduced opportunities in an underperforming, non-resilient economy for generations.
Social programs such as health, education and welfare will be compromised because bankers will get paid first and the amount of priority spending is increasing. This means the amount of money we have to spend as Canadians taxpayers paying the interest on our debt is a rising rate and a rising number. It is escalating quickly.
Deficits do not solve themselves. They take planning and resolve. The consequences of not solving them are upon us with rising inflation, rising taxation and rising income inequality. There are rising labour tensions, as we saw with the recent strike at the Public Service Alliance of Canada. Canadians are just trying to have their wages and salaries keep up with the rising cost of living that the government's negligence has caused.
Inflated dollars buy less. They buy less food, less shelter and fewer social services. We are all poorer by degrees. The government just hopes Canadians do not notice it too much. Canadians are noticing, and they are wondering how a modern country is throwing away its future and has forgotten the lessons from the last time this scenario unfolded just four decades ago. Politicians change, but institutional memory, the decision-making, should learn from the lessons of history, especially recent history.
I would say Canada's debt-to-GDP is a somewhat useless ratio, as it only compares how bad our ability to provide balance for tomorrow's taxpayers is with that of other spendy governments in the world. The debt-to-GDP is increasing, and there is no benefit to having a high debt-to-GDP. There is only a cost, and it is a rapidly rising cost.
As so many have indicated, that rising cost has rising consequences. The government presents in its own set of data that its sacred ratio will peak next year, this time at 43.5%. Let me caution colleagues on this opportunistic representation of data and remind everyone how last year, the Minister of Finance said that this ratio had peaked and would not increase further. Those are words and promises without meaning or real intent. I think we know the answer to that choice.
Let us look at what is called a national accounts basis, as the rest of the world looks at these metrics. That is that there is only one gross domestic product and there are a number of government debts in Canada. If we add in each of the provinces, on top of the federal government's debt, we get a ratio that is higher than 95% on the ratio.
We also have to subtract out the funds that do not belong to the government that it likes to include in its calculation. That is the amount it subtracts from workers who have to set aside money for programs, such as the Canada pension plan and the Quebec pension plan. I should point out that that is one of the costs to workers that is increasing substantially this year.
Canadians need to tell the government that these funds do not belong to the government. They belong to the people who have earned those pensions. The government should get them out of the calculations, trying to make its numbers more justifiable. These are not the Government of Canada's assets. They are being held in trust for Canadians at arm's-length organizations. The government has no recourse to these funds, or does it?
Does the government want to explain how it might have recourse to these funds, which Canadians think are sequestered for their retirement? I ask this question because the government went out of its way to freeze Canadians' bank accounts last year, and freezing earned benefits would pale in comparison to freezing a basic bank account, so someone could buy food and pay for their shelter in Canada.
In any event, for the financially literate, let us stop painting a rosier picture of reality. The government does not get to pick and choose which numbers it uses. Sustainable finance theories aside, and these are mock theories, the government does not get to pick and choose the numbers that affect people's lives. It should just be presented factually.
The irony is that the Liberal government presents a scenario in which provincial budget balances have collectively turned positive in 2022, and thus contributed to Canada's overall turnaround. Let us be clear. That is based on the surplus in one province, Alberta, and those revenues are predicated on world resource pricing of, yes, oil and gas, which the government scorns daily in the House.
As is said, comparing badly run jurisdictions in the world, Europe is a collection of poorly managed economies with no resource wealth, whereas Canada is a very poorly managed country with a backstop of significant resource wealth. It is very clear the country needs better management. We are in line for the job, and we are just waiting for the shareholders to fire this underperforming team.
I went through much of the budget presentation, and I noted a number of fictions that the government actually prints on government paper.
How is this? “The federal government’s fiscal anchor—reducing the federal debt-to-GDP ratio over the medium term—remains unchanged and is being met.” That is wrong. There is also this: “Even with higher borrowing costs, public debt charges as a share of the economy are projected to remain at historically low levels“. That is wrong, again.
The $44 billion in interest payments is up from $24 billion just two years ago, and a larger portion of the GDP than it had been in over 15 years. The government says these metrics are going in the right direction and hope that Canadians are not paying attention.
However, they are emulating themselves in the House of Commons by now putting nonsense on paper. Let us just keep spending and everything will balance itself.
How about this one? It says:
Budget 2023 proposes substantial measures as the next steps in the government's plan to “crowd-in” new private investment by leveraging public investment and government policy. The goal of this approach is not to substitute government for the private sector, nor supplant market-based decision making. It is to leverage the tools of government to mobilize the private sector.
No, it is not. That is fantasy. It is a false narrative based on giving taxpayer money to connected friends of the Liberal government.
We are giving foreign companies subsidies amounting to double the amount they are investing in this country to put Canadian taxpayer dollars in the pockets of foreign investors. That is how the Liberal government thinks it makes friends.
Who is laughing all the way to the bank? It is not Canadian taxpayers. It is not the $200 billion in project financing that was in line in Canada before the government created absolute market uncertainty.
What is not in this budget implementation bill? Anything to do with climate financing, just like last year. The budget speech indicated moving forward on climate initiatives, yet these exist nowhere in Bill C-47.
What is in this bill? A whole bunch of items that have nothing to do with the budget, including CEPA changes and jurisdictional oversteps. It is just tax, spend and divide. That is not the way to manage Canada's finances.
