Mr. Speaker, the member for Kingston and the Islands just assured me that he was not laughing; he was not even listening. It is too bad. He might learn something. I see him chatting over there without a mask, which does not bother me. I think he should be free to choose, but his other Liberal colleagues must be terrified at that reality.
Nonetheless, let us talk about the fiscal situation and the promises that were made by the Prime Minister. In 2015, the Prime Minister said that there would be three $10-billion deficits and a total of $30 billion in deficits, and then in the fourth year there would be a balanced budget. The Liberals blew through all of that in year one. They said they were being ambitious in their hopes for the country. Well, I would say that we should measure our ambition by how much we leave to the next generation, not by how little we leave to the next generation. While calling it ambition, the government is creating a situation where my children and their children will have so much less capacity to develop and invest in their own future because they will be paying for the debt that we have run up in such a short space of time. This was the promise made in 2015, broken right away, blown through. Now tens of billions of dollars in deficits per year have become hundreds of billions of dollars of debt and deficit.
The NDP has continually said throughout this process that it is not enough and the Liberals should be spending more. I just listened to speeches from the NDP members, and it is such a baffling philosophy to me. They talk about people who are struggling, but they never jump to the obvious conclusion, which is to let them keep more of their own money and let them spend it on what they want.
The member for Elmwood—Transcona said that he spoke with a constituent who, sadly, had to move back in with his parents as a result of expensive dental work. I would suggest not creating a massive new government program so the government can pay for his dental needs, because he would have to apply to the government, someone would have to be hired to evaluate his application to see if he qualified and we would have to establish thresholds and determine who the money will be paid through and when. Instead of going through that entire process, how about we cut his taxes? How about we spend less money, financed by inflation, so that his money can maintain its value?
Every time I hear stories from members about people who are struggling in this country, it strikes me that those on the left use these stories as an excuse to say we should have more government. More government is not going to help people who are struggling. Why are people struggling? It is because the cost of living is being driven up by high taxes, by inflation and by the fact that the government is financing its out-of-control spending by reducing the value of money that people have.
This is most evident in the case of gas prices. Let us be very clear and honest about why gas prices are where they are. It is because of a policy decision by left-wing parties, Liberal and NDP, that believe the gas price should be high because they want to use high gas prices as a tool to discourage people from driving. The only reason to support a carbon tax or carbon price, whatever we call it, is to discourage people from buying gas by making the costs higher.
Now, of course, the price of gas fluctuates and responds to other events, because absent the tax there is an underlying price that goes up and down. However, a significant amount of that price is determined by the taxation that sits on top of whatever price a private entity would charge. Of course there are fluctuations and of course those fluctuations are shaped by global events, but on top of those fluctuations we have policy choices made by politicians who believe that gas prices should be higher.
What strikes me is that almost nobody in the House is prepared to honestly acknowledge that. I hope that someone here, Liberal, NDP or Green, is willing to say what they honestly, clearly believe, which is that they want gas prices to be high. That is the point of a carbon tax. It is to make gas prices high. However, somehow, they think they can fool people by saying that even though they have put these taxes on gasoline, they would like prices to be lower, and then they blame something else for that fact. Their solution is to have higher and higher taxes and then to create more programs to allegedly treat the affordability problem.
To me, this is like being in a hole and we just keep digging, because the more spending we have, the more programs we promise, the more government intervention we have and the more expansion there is of the state sector, the more that money will have to come from somewhere and the more we are going to see deficit, inflation, higher prices and higher taxes. That in turn is going to make life less affordable. We are in this vicious cycle that is going to accelerate now as a result of this union between the Liberals and the NDP. We are going to see more spending. That is the promise of the deal these parties have made.
Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many people are saying that we need to get our spending under control and back off of some of these spending measures and move back toward balanced budgets, the government is agreeing to an extreme NDP economic policy to put its foot on the gas further. My concern about this deal between the Liberals and the NDP is that we are going to end up with the worst of both worlds. Historically what we have seen in the House is the NDP pushing far-left economic policy but sometimes standing with us in trying to hold the government accountable on its ethical failures. Very often, those in the NDP have opposed things like time allocation and programming motions. They have been willing to join with us on requests for documents on things like holding the government accountable over the WE Charity. We have had significant disagreements with the NDP about economic philosophy, but at least we have been able to work together on some issues around protecting Parliament and the functioning of Parliament and on holding the government accountable for significant ethics violations.
However, what we see with this deal is that the government is talking about being able to get a free pass to move its legislation faster without the kind of accountability and scrutiny that are required. It will be expecting the NDP not to hold it accountable on ethical issues and not challenge it on issues regarding access to documents in defence of Parliament. At the same time, we see, without any seeming reluctance, the Liberals diving fully into the radical left-wing economic philosophy of high taxes, high inflation, high deficits and high spending. What we are left with is this picture of an accord that looks like Liberal ethics with NDP economic philosophy, and that is a disaster for this country.
If we must stand alone, the Conservatives will indeed take a stand and fight back against these abuses of Parliament, abuses of process and broken promises to voters, and the escalating damage being done to our economy. We will not solve the affordability crisis through higher taxes, higher deficits and inflation. We will solve it by supporting economic growth driven by individual freedom and individual initiative. That is the kind of philosophy we need. We need support for economic growth driven by individual ingenuity and getting the government out of the way.
