Mr. Chair, we didn't put the Minister of Finance on this list, because it would be another invitation that she blew off.
I'll go over this again since, clearly, MP Chatel didn't hear about the witnesses I was talking about who are being missed because of her action to vote against having 19 hours or 20 hours of witnesses. She doesn't want to hear from Jack Mintz, a national renowned economist, about the impact this budget will have on people's finances or the fact that food banks have gone to seeing 1.5 million people a month. That's a new record. I'm sure MP Chatel is proud of that in her riding of Pontiac. I'm sure that they've also seen an increase in these food banks.
I'll repeat again about former finance minister Bill Morneau. I don't understand why the Liberals don't want to hear from their former colleague. Is it because they think that somehow he's not going to use PMO's talking points anymore, but will actually speak the truth about the impacts of the fiscal plan? Perhaps one of the reasons he left cabinet was not unlike the Right Honourable John Turner's. He left the current Prime Minister's father's cabinet over the issue of the fiscal framework and the desire of the government to do things and spend money at a level that hurts every Canadian.
Again, there's Edmonton's Food Bank and Feed Nova Scotia. MP Chatel probably didn't hear that part, so I will repeat it again. Feed Nova Scotia is the umbrella organization in my province of Nova Scotia that oversees all the food bank usage in our province.
I can understand why food bank usage has gone up so much and why government members would be unwilling and unable to stomach hearing more people from food banks talk about the impacts that this budget has and the previous budgets of the current Minister of Finance have had on increasing the number of people using their services. It's the one business in this country—perhaps the only one—that doesn't want to see an increase in customers, but the government has managed yet another record of increasing the customers of food banks.
I mentioned the Regina Food Bank. On the food banks in Quebec and the umbrella organization in Quebec, I am sure my Bloc friends would love to hear the impact of this budget on food banks in Quebec, but, no, the Liberals are shutting it down. The result of that is the situation we're in now.
All of this could have been avoided if the Liberals had stuck to the original plan that they agreed to, which was to allow 20 hours of witnesses. Now we've come into another compromise, as we always do as the opposition, of saying we'll cut that back an hour; you could simply do it. I know that my colleagues and I are willing to work over the weekend. I'm sure the government members would have no problem working over the weekend to hear the witnesses to get that job done before clause-by-clause is completed.
I just don't understand why government members aren't willing to put in the time over the weekend to hear the witnesses. All they have to do now is agree and say—and I would certainly take a point of order from any of the Liberal members here saying this—“We agree. We agree on 19. We're wrong. We made a mistake. We could have avoided all of this as the government if we had only stuck to the plan that we agreed to on 20 hours.”
I'll challenge any of the Liberal members now to a point of order to say they will agree to the 19 hours and vote for this motion so that witnesses can be heard over the weekend. However, if government members aren't willing to do that and aren't willing to work on the weekend to deal with a half-trillion dollar spending budget, they will sit silent and I will continue.
There's the Parkdale Community Food Bank in Toronto. I'm sure that's an organization that MP Beech is familiar with. Certainly, they would be familiar with the impacts of his government's policies—and him as the parliamentary secretary—increasing their customer base's demands and the massive increase to their budget that they need, not only food donations but monetary donations, as a result of that. I was sure he would want to hear from the Parkdale Community Food Bank, but apparently he does not and neither do the other Liberals sitting around the table.
They would rather just sweep it all under the carpet and not have any witnesses telling them what they think the impacts of the budget are so that decisions can be made on clause-by-clause—as MP Blaikie said—that will allow members of Parliament to not only vote on those clauses based on instinct but to vote understanding the interest groups that are most impacted and what their views are. That would be an informed vote, which is something the Liberals obviously want to make sure members of Parliament don't have access to.
We have on the list that Algoma Orchards and their executive director want to appear. We have Grace Yan from the Philippines Chamber of Commerce in Calgary, who is also a small business owner. Why would we want to hear from small business owners about the increased tax burden that this bill and the 51 acts that it amends impose on them—not just in taxation but in regulatory burden—and how the impacts of inflation that have resulted from this and the subsequent interest rate increases have probably driven their sales downwards as a result of record spending and debt?
By the way, that will be $1.3 trillion at the end of this five-year fiscal framework. The national debt will be $1.3 trillion. What that builds up is a massive interest payment.
My colleague MP Chambers asked the Minister of Finance, in this committee meeting on this bill, what the interest rate on that debt is this year. Apparently the Minister of Finance didn't know that because she couldn't answer it. She wasn't willing to say “$47 billion” this year. That's as much as we transfer to the provinces on health care.
It would be good to understand from the many health care organizations that could come before this committee, in the remaining nine hours of witness testimony that we're proposing, about the impact that's having on the federal transfers to health care and not being able to actually spend more of the taxpayer money that Ottawa receives on health care because we're having to pay this ever-increasing amount of interest to bankers on the record debt. The current Prime Minister and his father have together added $1.1 trillion of debt to the taxpayer burden. What the interest on that debt—like that on your credit card—does is restrict the ability of the government to provide more adequate funding for health care. That is getting only about 22% of the cost. The government used to spend 50% of the cost of provincial health care. Now it's only 22% as $47.8 billion is being spent on the interest on the debt. If we weren't doing that, then we could be back up to having the option to spend 50% of health care funding. Imagine how much better that would be.
We've heard in the news all this week about emergency room issues in the health care system across this country, from Alberta and the Prairies to Ontario to my part of the world, yet the government seems more intent on building up interest costs and paying bankers interest than it is on hearing from health care providers on this budget and on the impact of the constraint those interest payments place on the ability of the government to adequately support health care in our country.
The NAM Centre for Holistic Recovery and Dr. Gill, the founder of that, want to appear.
The Mustard Seed company in Calgary and the Hope Mission would like to appear to deal with the issue of homelessness. That is something we keep talking about but do not seem to be improving. The budget is fairly silent on that, although the framework allocated $82 billion and committed that chronic homelessness would be cut in half by next year. In fact the Minister of Housing and his officials admitted last week at a public accounts committee that it has actually gone up by 12% and not down by half. That is yet another example of having government input—saying that $82 billion of spending through this fiscal framework will produce results—but not really worrying too much about the output. When homelessness is going up instead of going down, we can see that the government, yet again in another critical area, is ineffective.
I'm sure they don't want to hear, in the next nine hours, from the Hope Mission about how the chronic homelessness, which they have to serve, is going up while the government idly sits by and, as my colleague MP Morantz said, spends record amounts of money for the lowest level of results we've seen.
The Greener Village food bank of Fredericton in my next-door province would like to appear—that's Dan Taylor—but it's apparently yet another food bank that will be silenced by the fact that these Liberals are unable and unwilling to allow witness testimony for another nine hours, as they originally agreed. Actually, they originally agreed for a total of 20 and have been willing to allow only 10. Presumably, that's because they didn't like what they were hearing.
The Calgary Food Bank and the Whitehorse Food Bank want to appear on the list and won't be given an opportunity to appear. BeTheChangeYYC, which is another Calgary-based organization, wants to appear.
Richard Dias wants to appear to talk about monetary policy. It's a critical part of something that is in the fiscal framework, because we have economic projections about what's going to happen, yet he won't be allowed to attend. This is because, as we know, the Prime Minister doesn't think about monetary policy, although most Canadians do as they see interest rates going up.
There's the Canadian Real Estate Association. Housing is a major issue, as we know. The CMHC projects that getting back to housing affordability in Canada requires the building of 3.5 million new housing units by 2030. At the current rate of about 200,000 housing units completed a year under this government, we will be two million short. Even by the standard set by the government's own Crown corporation, there will be nowhere near that number of housing units built.
Even though they're spending $82 billion in this budget over the fiscal framework to try to deal with issues of homelessness and the housing affordability crisis, the housing minister won't even say the words “housing affordability crisis”, although it is written that way in the Crown corporation that reports to him in their annual report, CMHC. This is just like how the Minister of Finance won't say the words “$47 billion in interest”. She is embarrassed to say that, because she's embarrassed that's the result of her spending.
I think it's incredible that we could have a discussion on this bill without a discussion with the Canadian Real Estate Association on what is probably the primary thing concerning Canadians besides food inflation. Food inflation is now a structural food inflation, it appears, averaging about 10% a year. We see it every month, month after month, making it more unaffordable. Again, apparently, those are issues that the governing Liberals don't like to hear about, so they would rather impose a form of closure on witnesses in this committee by not scheduling the meetings required this week to do the 20 hours of witness testimony. There's still time.
MPs on the government side, MP Chatel and MP Beech, there's still time for you to commit right here and now. Wait. I didn't hear you doing that. I'll give you a moment again. You can come in and say, “Yes, we will finish this this weekend and we will do the 19 hours that this motion calls for.”
Wait. There's silence again. Apparently, the members on the government side are uninterested in hearing another nine hours of witnesses to have a total of 19 hours of witnesses on a half-trillion dollar spending bill. Why allow public organizations to—