Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Niagara West.
I would like to quote a fiscal Conservative, who stated:
Canadians want to know that the principles guiding government are ones that they share.
Here are our principles.
First, governments created the deficit burden. And so governments must resolve it—by focusing first in their own backyards—by getting spending down, not by putting taxes up.
Second, our fiscal strategy will be worth nothing if at the end of the day we have not provided hope for jobs and for growth. We must focus on getting growth up at the same time as we strive to get spending down.
Third, we must be frugal in everything we do. Waste in government is simply not tolerable.
Fourth, we must forever put aside the old notion that new government programs require additional spending. They don’t. What they do require is the will to shut down what doesn’t work and focus on what can. That is why a central thrust of our effort is reallocation. Whether on the spending side or on the revenue side, every initiative in this budget reflects a shift from lower to higher priority areas.
...finally, we must always be fair and compassionate. It is the most vulnerable whose voices are often the least strong. We must never let the need to be frugal become an excuse to stop being fair.
That was former finance minister Paul Martin in his 1996 budget speech. He understood how to create jobs and growth: It was to focus on growth at the same time as getting spending down and not putting taxes up. It was to forever put aside the old notion that new government programs required additional spending.
This budget in front of the House today does the opposite. It increases taxes. It increases spending, and spends on consumption rather than on investment. This is an approach the current government has taken since it came to office in 2015, and it is not working. In fact, the government admits to this in its own budget.
On page 25 of the budget document, there is a chart entitled, “Average Potential Annual Growth in Real GDP per capita, Selected OECD Countries, 2020-2060”. In this chart, Canada is dead last. It is an indictment of the economic policies of the government over the past six years. While the budget pays lip service to jobs and growth, it does not have a credible plan to create them.
Here is what the CEO of RBC, David McKay, said recently about the government’s economic policies. RBC is one of the largest private-sector employers in Canada. He stated:
Tax and spend to me is like eating Sugar Pops for breakfast. You feel really good for an hour and you feel crappy by noon, at the end of the day. And that’s what tax-and-spend gives you. It doesn’t give you sustainable prosperity.
The budget increases taxes. In fact, it levies a new tax on significant financial institutions, which have been one of the few sectors of growth in the Canadian economy in recent years.
The budget increases government spending. It calls for more than $56 billion in new spending over the next six years. That comes on top of the additional spending that was announced in last fall’s economic update. That, in turn, comes on top of the additional spending announced in last year's budget. In fact, the government is now spending $70 billion a year more than it did before the pandemic hit. That is more than 3% of GDP, which is an incredible increase in government spending.
Despite all this new spending, the government is not allocating spending in the right places. For example, the spending does not reflect the need to strengthen Canada’s defence and security and the need to uphold our international commitments.
All of this new spending announced in the budget in last fall's economic update, and in last year’s budget, is not going to the Canadian military. First off, a big problem with the budget documents, in terms of transparency to Parliament, is that the government is proposing two very different and contradictory figures for military spending in the budget documents. One number it proposes is an additional $8 billion over the next five years, but elsewhere in the budget it proposes an additional $23 billion over the next three years. These numbers are not fully accounted for.
If we set aside the two different figures in the budget for military spending, even if we take the most optimistic scenario that the government has laid out in the budget, it still doesn't meet Canada’s international NATO commitments.
The world changed on February 24. Russia attacked Ukraine, beginning the first war between states in Europe since 1945. In doing so, autocratic states such as Russia have made it clear that they are prepared to attack democracies abroad and here at home.
Other governments have realized that the world has changed. That is why, on February 27, Germany did a U-turn on decades of foreign and military policy. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who heads a centre-left coalition, announced that Germany would immediately begin increasing defence spending to meet and exceed the 2% NATO commitment, beginning with an immediate infusion of $140 billion Canadian in new military spending.
The German government understands that the world has changed. The Liberal government does not.
NATO members have had a long-standing commitment to spend 2% of gross domestic product on the military. As I've just mentioned, Germany will be meeting that commitment. Canada’s closest allies already exceed that commitment, including the United States, the United Kingdom and France. Canada does not, and the budget contains no measures for us to meet that NATO commitment. In fact, in the latest NATO data, Canada ranks 25th out of 29 member states of NATO, in terms of our contribution to our defence and security.
That was not always the case. Canada was once a leading contributor to the alliance. More than 1.1 million Canadians served in the Second World War, and over 40,000 paid the ultimate sacrifice and gave their lives in defence of this country. For decades, throughout the 1980s and well into the early 1990s, Canada exceeded the 2% commitment. Canada spent more than 2% of its gross domestic product on defence.
Here is why that lack of defence spending should concern us all. There is no greater guarantee of peace and security in this world than military strength.
In fact, before 1945, in North America, both Canada and the United States had no standing militaries of any scale to deter aggression. In the century before 1945, our histories were replete with bloody and costly wars that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our citizens in defence of democracy, freedom and the rule of law.
That is why, since 1945, we have pledged to never again go through that horrific period in history, as we agreed to establish standing militaries of sufficient size to deter the aggression we are seeing around the world and, potentially, the aggression we might see in the Indo-Pacific region.
The greatest guarantor of peace and security is a strong and robust military. Because the government is not allocating enough spending to Canada’s military, it is leaving Canada exposed and vulnerable in a violent and unstable world.
As Mr. Martin understood almost three decades ago, the budget should create jobs and growth by getting spending down and not by getting taxes up, and by forever putting aside the old notion that new government programs require additional spending. What spending does take place should take the form of investment, rather than consumption.
The government, though, has forgotten the lessons of the 1990s. Taxes and spending are up. New programs have not come from reallocation but from additional spending, and this spending comes in the form of consumption, rather than investment.
Despite all this additional spending, the government's budget does not uphold our NATO defence spending commitment, as outlined in the Wales Summit Declaration of 2014.
For all those reasons, I cannot support this budget.
