Thank you very much.
I certainly do hope that the whips grant that because I will enjoy having a conversation with my constituents and the Canadian people moving forward.
Let's start maybe with what I was hoping to see in the budget and the budget implementation act. Conservatives really came into this looking for three things, one of which was tangible support for Canadians through more powerful paycheques and taking less of those paycheques, because it's extremely challenging.
I had—I can say his name I guess in committee—Kevin Lamoureux challenge me when I talked a little bit about the marginal tax rate. He didn't seem to know that there are Canadians who are earning well less than $50,000 who are paying a marginal tax rate in excess of 50%. That has been characterized as the war on work, and I think it really is.
Can you imagine earning $40,000 or $50,000 a year, and because of the housing crisis your cost of rent has gone up to $2,000 or $3,000 a month, so the after-tax income you are left with is maybe half? Then for every dollar you earn over that $40,000, $50,000 or $60,000 you are giving up more than 50% of that to the government.
Let's say you're offered that overtime shift for $20 per hour or whatever it is. Now you have to arrange child care. Maybe now instead of making food at home you now have to go pick something up, so there are additional costs in that. These are all of the costs that are associated with those additional hours, and you're only going to keep maybe 40¢ on the dollar or 30¢ on the dollar.
The Liberals are great at giving themselves a pat on the back and saying, “Well done, man. We really took that money from A and gave it to B. We should be heroes for that.” The reality is that they have absolutely zero dollars on their side. That's all Canadian taxpayers' money. In order to give something, you have to take something first.
The war on work continues on that side, as we have single mothers who often have to pay more than a marginal tax rate who are earning less than $50,000 a year and who are often paying more than 50%, meaning 50¢ on every dollar they earn goes to the government.
Seniors who are receiving the GIS, or the guaranteed income supplement, are also often giving up...because the GIS claws back at 50% irrespective of even income tax, which then starts at $14,000 or $15,000. They are already starting at a marginal tax rate of 50%. Then you add income tax on top of that, so you're looking at 60% or 70%. A senior may be only keeping 30¢ on every dollar they are earning at the massive income level of $20,000 a year.
These are shocking numbers, and I can't believe that this government and other folks in the media don't shine a brighter light on the war on work that's currently being engaged in by these Liberals and this Liberal government. We are penalizing people who are trying desperately to make it to the middle class.
Winston Churchill once described how a country taxing itself into prosperity is a bit like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by pulling the handle. I don't know if anyone's ever characterized so well what this Liberal government is attempting to do. They are pulling on that handle so hard, and they are in complete frustration and confusion as to why we have one of the lowest rates of innovation, productivity and GDP rate growth predicted in the OECD, because they are just reefing and reefing on that handle. They don't understand why they are not lifting things up. They don't understand why our housing has doubled over the last eight years. They don't understand why the cost of rent has doubled and why we are not getting more powerful paycheques.
The second thing the Conservatives were looking for was fiscal restraint. I will hand it to this government. In the fall economic statement, they actually showed a path—granted it was five years out—to a balanced budget. It's amazing, in just four or five months that path has completely disappeared. It has disappeared into the ether. Instead we have deficits as far as the eye can see.
According to Tiff Macklem, interest rates are going to stay high. That means we'll see, likely within the next couple of years, that the cost of borrowing will exceed the total health care transfers. We'll be spending more on interest than we will be spending on health care. We need a path back to sustainability.
If you remember, Mr. Chair, about four or five months ago, the finance minister said, we have “a line we will not cross”. The debt-to-GDP ratio will not increase, no way, no how. That can't happen in Prime Minister Trudeau's Canada. It will not happen.
Well, less than six months later, guess what: We are now forecasting that the debt-to-GDP ratio will increase.
They say, “Hold on, Phil, don't worry. We've got a plan. In two or three years, we are going to cut departments by 3%. We are going to get that debt-to-GDP ratio under control. We're going to see after this mild recession, so mild of a recession that you can't even feel it, that this economy is going to roar back. Don't worry about it. We're going to have more revenue than you can imagine. We've got these 3% spending cuts.”
As we heard from officials today, we're less than six months from when this government believes those spending cuts are going to start, and not one of them has a plan. Not one of them could tell me one dollar that they were going to reduce their spending by. We see this over and over again. This government continues to get an “A” for announcements, but an “F” for follow-up. We do not have a plan.
I'm curious, too, as to whether the strike was priced into the budget. Will that be an additional cost? The negotiation took over two years and required a work stoppage to get this government to a serious bargaining position finally. Will that make it even worse?
We have right now.... I refuse, with all respect, to take with any seriousness a budget forecast that is anything more than a year in advance. I suspect that will change, just as it did from the fall economic statement. As you remember, six months ago, we were going to have a balanced budget in five years. Now we have deficits as far as the eye can see. Six months ago, we weren't going to have a recession, and now we're going to have a recession. They told us we were going to have deflation. We had inflation.
You'll have to excuse my skepticism with respect to this ability to forecast anything. They could not tell us whether there was going to be inflation. They said deflation. They told us that there was going to be a balanced budget, and now we have deficits for as far as the eye can see.
We now have a forecasted debt that's going to go over $1.3 trillion. Even if we took out the COVID spending, this government has dramatically increased expenditures since 2008. There's no reason why we couldn't have a meaningful approach to balancing the budget. In fact, they showed that we could do it. They showed in the fall economic statement that there was a way to balance the budget. They're continuing their reckless tax-and-spend policies. Once again, they're standing in that bucket reefing on the handle, trying to pull it up. In complete frustration and confusion, they don't understand why they can't get that bucket up. They're just reefing on it as hard as they can.
It boggles my mind. Honestly, when I sit in the House of Commons and hear these Liberals once again praising themselves on spending other people's money.... It's not their money. It started with a single mom in Orono, with the steelworker in Hamilton, the oil and gas worker in Alberta. Those are the folks who generate income. Governments don't generate income. They don't generate value. They can divide equity, which is an important role, and I don't think any of us would dispute that. However, our future prosperity will never come from a government program. It will never come from a regulation. It will never come from a tax policy. It will come from the people of Canada.
Canadians are the engine that drives our economy. In lots of cases, the best thing the government can do is just get out of the way and let Canadians do what they do best, which is to work hard, generate great ideas, innovate, reinvest in the economy and grow our economy.
We have entered into a potential economic decline. We're forecast by the OECD to be the worst in the OECD over the next 20 years with respect to capital investment. That's scary. Capital investment means buying machinery. If you can imagine, we have two factories, factory A and factory B. Factory A invests in the equipment it needs. Now it can produce the same level or better quality of product, but it can produce it at half the cost. You can imagine that if factory B hasn't done that investment, it's really only a matter of time until factory A puts factory B out of business.
We are in danger of being factory B, because we're not making the capital investments. That's a direct result of this government's policies. We are not incentivizing business. We are not encouraging. We are not rewarding businesses to make those investments back into the production of their goods and services. Instead, this government is taking a larger and larger piece of the economy. We are strangling, starving out and depriving the private sector of oxygen so that they can't do what they need, which is to reinvest in that factory A to make sure we have state-of-the-art factories.
The world is changing, too. The pace at which we need to invest in innovation has never been greater. We have artificial intelligence. We have biohealth sciences growing at tremendous speeds. We need a government that's agile and that's able to put in place the type of regulations and legislative framework needed for us to be a leader in these technologies going forward. Instead, we get more of the same: tax and spend, tax and spend, tax and spend.
We know that, with the government, from the very first promise that the budget would balance itself.... As Prime Minister Harper said, there would be these itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny little deficits. Guess what. Prime Minister Harper was right. Those deficits became perennial deficits, and you see that. Keynesian economics will tell you that when times are good—times are good—we need to save money as a government. We didn't do that. We just spent. We spent the cupboard dry. As Prime Minister Harper said, those tiny, itsy-bitsy deficits, so teeny you can't see them, became larger and larger deficits.
When we then came to a significant challenge with COVID, we'd already spent the cupboard dry. Instead of just spending on the COVID relief, which Conservatives supported, this government spent on anything and everything, including spending nearly $1 billion on WE Charity. They spent and they spent and they spent. Now we're in a continuing deficit position of tens and tens of billions of dollars going forward. Our debt is forecast to be over $1.3 trillion.
Conservatives were expecting to see a path back to financial sustainability. Instead, we saw the casting aside of the fiscal anchor that had just been adopted a year earlier. Now we're once again adrift, without a fiscal anchor and without a fiscal plan. We'll just continue to spend, spend, spend.
We know what that results in, because the leader of the official opposition forecast it. In fact, I can remember him in the House talking about the possibility of inflation, and then what the finance minister said: “No, no, no, we're in fear of deflation. What don't you understand, Mr. Poilievre? It's deflation we need to worry about.”
It turns out that the leader of the official opposition was right. We got inflation that we hadn't seen for 20 years. The more this government spends, the more inflation we have. If there's anything I could share with my colleagues across the aisle, it would that very basic, fundamental principle of economics: The more the government spends, the more inflation we'll get and the more things will cost.
I'm sorry, Marty. Are you on the list here?
I'd feel bad taking up all this time. I can see my colleague to my left here—