That's exactly what I was doing, so I'll quote back the relevant portion of the motion: “That the committee continue its pre-study of”—what?—“Bill C-47”—that is the budget implementation act—“...tabled in Parliament on March 28, by”, and it goes on to talk about a number of things that would be done.
I'm speaking directly to the budget and to housing affordability, which has become an appalling failure on the part of this Liberal government, so I'm going to continue to talk about housing, Mr. Chair. I note that other members of this committee have also addressed the issue of the budget and have been given much leeway to actually address the broad scope of this fiscally irresponsible and reckless fiscal document.
Mr. Chair, I'll go back. This house that I purchased—with the green carpets, the orange carpets and the crimson carpets that my wife was shocked to see when she came—became our first home, and it was affordable. I was on a very low salary at the time, and even on that salary—my wife wasn't working anymore because we had our first child at home—even on that single salary, I could buy a home with a down payment and afford the mortgage payments when the interest rate was 10% per annum. Today, no matter what the interest rate is, housing is no longer affordable in Canada. It is a major failure on the part of this government.
It's not only housing, Mr. Chair: Taxes are going up on everything, whether it's CPP, EI premiums or payroll taxes, and whether it's excise taxes that go up in this budget and carbon taxes that go up in this budget. This is what the Liberal government is doing to Canadians. Not only did it create the problem; it's making things worse.
Here's another problem, Mr. Chair. We have stagnating wages. Inflation is eroding what the dollar buys, and wages are not keeping up. Sadly, those with assets are growing richer, and those who rely on a paycheque are getting poorer day by day, because of the eroding value of those paycheques.
Did you know that one in five Canadians today is skipping a meal each day? One in five people across our country, one in five individuals in our neighbourhoods, is skipping a meal every day just to get by, because they can't afford that extra meal.
It's a perverse situation, Mr. Chair, when the working poor and the indigent are approaching food banks and asking for medically assisted death: actual proven cases of people approaching our food banks and saying, “I want to die rather than live in poverty and live hungry.” Is that the perverse situation Canada now finds itself in? Is that how we want to live as a country?
Yet there's very little in this budget that addresses that problem. Today, I viewed a video online about a food bank in Toronto called “Fort York”, with a line blocks long.... That's going viral now, of course, because it symbolizes what this Liberal government has done to our country.
Now I want to go to the issue of uncontrolled spending, Mr. Chair. I mentioned earlier that uncontrolled spending actually contributes to the inflationary pressures that we face today in our country.
Uncontrolled spending undermines the value of the paycheques that Canadians receive. Uncontrolled spending undermines the work that Canadians do. We're pumping so many dollars—so much liquidity—into the economy that there are way more dollars chasing the same number of goods and services. Any economist will tell you that if we cannot improve our productivity in our country—in other words, what every single Canadian produces—we have some serious problems on our hands. One of those problems is inflation.
The deficit in this budget is $43 billion. Remember, it was the finance minister who said that they were going to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio and that they were on track for balanced budgets. That was the finance minister, only months ago, in the fall economic update. Today, she's saying, “Sorry, folks,” and that she was just kidding.
It's actually gone. The balanced budget commitment is gone. You know that line that she drew in the sand a year ago and said she'd never step across? Well, she just did. Nyah, nyah, that's tough on you.
Mr. Chair, this country has moved from having a $2-billion surplus under Stephen Harper some eight years ago to having a massive structural deficit. I mean that word “structural”, because it implies that these deficits are going to be a way of life for Canadians for the foreseeable future. These are interminable deficits that we are running.
Who pays for that, Mr. Chair? It's future generations of Canadians, so I want to speak to those future generations of Canadians. They are our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren and new immigrants who are looking to Canada as a great country to come to and live in. Their future is a future of debt, deficits and rising interest rates, where they'll be paying back the money we're spending today.
In other words, we're spending our children's and our grandchildren's inheritance as this government blows the wad year after year. In fact, it will shock Canadians to know that over the last eight years, this government has racked up as much debt as every single Canadian government before it—combined.
It should come as a shocking statistic to Canadians to understand that this Liberal government has paid no regard to its obligation to future generations of Canadians, but continues to spend recklessly, knowing full well it will be left to a Conservative government to clean up the mess in the future, as it always is. It's always Conservative governments cleaning up the mess of previous Liberal governments. That's where we find ourselves.
The generational debt that I talk of is of epic proportions. Today, $81,000 is owed by every single household in this country. It's going up in leaps and bounds as this government continues to spend.
Let me talk a little, Mr. Chair, about the staggering cost of government.
Now, one would have thought that a government that's going to spend so much money at the very least would understand that it's important to exercise restraint in how much it spends on the government itself, and that it would exercise restraint and spend cautiously when it comes to growing the civil service. However, over the last eight years of this Liberal government, the government has added 80,000 new positions, federal government positions, each of which has to be paid with benefits, with pension....
I ask Canadians, has your service level gone up since the government added 80,000 federal government jobs? Are your passports coming quicker, the renewals that you need...? Are your visas coming more quickly? How about your tax refund? Is it coming more quickly?
It goes on and on. The service level we get has decreased, Mr. Chair, yet the cost of government has gone up dramatically. In fact, it's a 30% increase in the cost of government, with a lower level of service and interminable deficits. That is the staggering cost of government today under a Liberal government.
Well, what about our economic performance, Mr. Chair? I had hoped that at the very least there would be a plan in this budget for economic growth. This has been promised every year since Prime Minister Trudeau got elected, and every year economists point out that his budgets do not have a growth component to them.
Canada suffers from a major weakness. It is our Achilles heel, and it is what I mentioned earlier: our productivity, our declining productivity. In other words, it's what Canadians produce. Each Canadian is producing less and less as time goes on, which undermines our economic competitiveness vis-à-vis the very competitive countries around the world that want to eat our lunch when it comes to our economy, to manufacturing and to trade. When productivity lags behind, it undermines our long-term prosperity as a country.
Did you know, Mr. Chair, that Canada is at the bottom of the list of OECD countries when it comes to foreign investment or, in other words, attracting investment from abroad? When we attract dollars from abroad, when foreign investors say that Canada is a great place to invest in, that's good for our economy. Now, there are some investments from abroad that we have to review very carefully, of course, to determine whether they are to Canada's net benefit, but overwhelmingly, the money that comes from abroad, from the United States, from the European Union and elsewhere, is used to create jobs in Canada, to grow our prosperity as a country. Sadly, we are falling further and further behind when it comes to foreign direct investment in our economy.
Why is that? One of the reasons is regulatory strangulation. In other words, we have so many laws and so many regulations spread across our country, especially at the federal government level, that businesses are no longer free to thrive in an open marketplace. Bit by bit, we're shutting down the marketplace by imposing level upon level of government regulation, so that many businesses simply give up. They say, “We just can't grow,” or they say, “We're going to have to shut down.” When we have a government, a Liberal government, that calls those small businesses that are growing our economy—or that are supposed to be growing our economy—tax cheats, that's a great way of incentivizing and encouraging our small businesses to grow—to call them tax cheats, the way this Liberal government has done.
Another area where we're declining is domestic investment. Fewer and fewer Canadian companies and entrepreneurs are willing to reinvest their profits in our economy. Do you know what they're doing? They're looking elsewhere. Colleagues, you know this. Domestic investment is disappearing. It's going to markets around the world that actually appreciate their investment and welcome their investment.
Our taxation in Canada requires, I believe, significant reform. There hasn't been tax reform in our country for many years. We're paying a huge price for that. We need to review how our tax system operates to ensure that Canadian businesses and foreign businesses that want to invest here can do so in a thriving economic environment. Right now, that doesn't exist.
Here's just a note. It's a little factoid, Mr. Chair. Did you know that Canada's per capita GDP.... There are a number of standards and organizations that assess per capita GDP around the world. I've just taken one of them and plucked these figures. The per capita GDP in Canada is $59,000.
Do you know what it is in the United States? It's $78,000. That's almost $20,000 more. Do you know what it is in Australia? It's $9,000 more than in Canada. We are falling further and further behind when it comes to our economic performance as a country. We're falling further behind in terms of our competitiveness when it comes to attracting investment from other countries. Mr. Chair, we are failing when it comes to economic growth.
I'm going to close my remarks and pass it on to my colleagues here.
I want to say this as well, that there was one last thing that I wanted to see in this budget. I think you can guess what that might have been. Beyond its being just a growth budget—which it isn't—and beyond its being just a low-tax budget—which it isn't—I wanted to see if this budget actually had a substantive amount allocated to address the curse and the threat of foreign interference in our country.
As you know, colleagues, our country faces a very significant threat from hostile actors around the world who want to interfere in our elections, steal our intellectual property, steal our research, and conspire to undermine our long-term prosperity as a country and our long-term national security. It's right for us to ask if there is a sufficient amount in this budget that would address the threat of foreign interference.
This week we learned that one of our colleagues, Mr. Chong, had his family threatened because he voted in favour of human rights in the House of Commons. Mr. Chong is a champion of human rights at home and abroad. Because of his firm stand on human rights, his family elsewhere around the world has been threatened by the Communist regime in Beijing.
It's right for us to ask if there's enough in this budget to address that very specific threat to our democracy. The sad answer is no. There's virtually nothing in this budget to address that threat.
When we raised the issue and asked in the House of Commons, Mr. Chair, that the Speaker allow us an emergency debate on the issue of foreign interference—specifically on the intimidation of Canadian MPs and their families when it comes to standing up for human rights—the response was, I'm sorry, we're not going to grant this emergency debate. It seems that foreign interference isn't important enough.
Mr. Chair, you will sense my profound disappointment in this budget, and you will understand why we, as Conservatives, had no option but to vote against the budget earlier today in the House of Commons. We will do so again at third reading.
Whenever called on to do so, we will vote against this budget, unless there are substantive amendments made that allow us to confirm that the investments that are required to be made in things like addressing foreign interference, are, in fact, made. We don't see that there now. There are many other failings in this budget.
I now yield the floor to my colleague, Mr. Morantz.