It's partly a matter of concern about the economy. There's nothing unusual in that and nothing dramatically different from what the government showed in its numbers.
It's worth commenting quickly, though, on the reliability of the projections. One of the comments I made at the time of the fall economic statement was that we are now on the verge of the 2024-25 fiscal year, which was the final year of the projections in the government's fall economic statement in 2019. The projected spending has gone up by more than $100 billion over that period—so on average, every year, $25 billion more.
Now, partly that's inflation. We can debate the degree to which the inflation was actually caused by fiscal policy. I think it certainly bears some responsibility for it, so you don't get a total pass on that. The other thing that's happening is that we are getting fiscal frameworks delivered with very straightforward knowledge that there's more spending to come that's not in them.
I do have concerns along the lines of what I expressed earlier, that we're kind of being trained not to take these things seriously. If a fiscal framework is announced, a formal budget presented or a fall economic statement, and then days later there's an announcement of a significant new program that wasn't in it, then it kind of undermines the value of the process itself, and our hearts should all beat faster when that happens.
I mean it not just as flattery to this group when I say that the work of parliamentarians in forums like this is absolutely critical to holding governments to account. When you see a framework that's laid out as though we should take it seriously and you know there are significant spending programs that are not yet accounted for in it, you have to put up your hands and object and say you're not getting the numbers that matter.
The other thing I'll quickly say, if I haven't run out of time, is that we have the debt-to-GDP ratio as a very hard indicator. It's widely accepted as a measure of fiscal prudence. It should be going down and it's not. It's going up. That's just the wrong direction of a very basic number.