Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for appearing before committee again.
I again want to congratulate you for being the first female finance minister to deliver a federal budget and, hopefully, it's the first of many to be delivered by women in the future.
I do note, however, that this is also the largest spending budget ever and creates the largest debt and deficits in our country's history. My fear is that future generations will look back on this budget as the one that created a financial burden that undermined their prospects of living the Canadian dream. I certainly hope that is not the case and that, in fact, Canadians still have the prospect of a bright future ahead of them.
With that in mind, I want to refer you to not only the fall economic statement, but also the budget that this BIA implements.
I note that in the fall economic statement you projected GDP growth at 4.8%, but the budget says that it's going to be better than that; it's going to be 5.8%. You projected in the fall that revenues would be around $335 billion. Now, in the budget, you're predicting that it's going to be better than that, and we're going to have $20 billion more. With more cash coming in by way of revenues and more economic growth predicted in this budget, you're still projecting a deficit that is higher than what you projected in the fall economic statement.
The same is true in 2022-23, which is the next fiscal year. Again, the projected revenues are going to be up by about $20 billion, so you have more revenue coming in, more money in the bank account, and your growth is projected to be close to 1% higher than the fall economic statement had suggested, yet you're predicting a deficit that is $9 billion higher than the fall economic statement.
My concern is this. We have better growth; we have higher government revenues in this year and the next, yet, for some reason, you're not only spending all of the unexpected additional revenue, you're also increasing the amount you're going to borrow each year. We're going backwards, big time.
For every extra dollar that comes in in revenue, you seem to think that you can spend that dollar and then borrow even more than you had initially projected, so how is that a sustainable fiscal and debt management plan?