Hi, Mom. I'm sure the other two are my wife and one of my two sons, because my other son has better things to do.
Canada's fiscal year-end is March 31, and we're now in December. The Toronto Stock Exchange, the TSX, requires any publicly listed company to have their accounts publicized, I think, within 30 days. If the Government of Canada were on the TSX, it would be delisted for not having the accounts open.
Why is this important? Well, there are several reasons. One is accountability, but parliamentarians are asked to and tasked with voting on expenditures. The supplementary estimates just came out—they're $26 billion—and we were asked to vote on them before we even knew whether there was any money in the bank. Can you imagine going to your bank and asking for a mortgage for $20 million for a house but telling the bank, “You have to tell me yes or no before I tell you whether I have a job, money in the bank, finances and the ability to pay”? That's what the government has done in delaying the public accounts. The supplementary estimates were reported two weeks ago, and we were forced to vote on $26 billion before we found out the government blew 55% past their previous guardrail.
Fired deputy leader and finance minister Chrystia Freeland stated that a $40-billion deficit was our guardrail. We would not go past it. It had as much credibility as Barack Obama drawing his red line in the sand about chemical weapons in Syria: “Oh, we went over that. Well, here's a new line in the sand over slaughtering Kurds.” They blew by it. We voted on it after being assured repeatedly that we would not go past the $40-billion deficit, yet what was the deficit, as we found out yesterday weeks after we approved the supplementary spending? It was $61 billion. We should have had this information long ago, and now we're asked to work an extra day in the House of Commons to examine this money—the $61 billion in spending, $21 billion of it blown past—but the Liberals say it's inconvenient for them; we shouldn't be doing it.
I'm happy to work today. I'd rather be back home. I had meetings planned in another city today that I've had to blow off again, but this is important. It's $21 billion. The Canadian dollar is cratering. It's lost four cents. If anyone around the table—or the three people, maybe four now, watching at home—is heading to the States over Christmas, the dollar has cratered four cents in the last couple of months.
Now we have a financial crisis. We have a finance minister—well, maybe we don't. Maybe it's François-Philippe Champagne or maybe it's not. Who's next up? Is it Randy Boissonnault? How bad is the government that they don't even know, before they fire their finance minister, to have the next one lined up?
Apparently, Mark Carney was lined up. It is twice that he's gone to the altar and then no-showed. How many more times is the government going to plan a wedding for Mark Carney just to have him show up and then leave all the guests waiting and wondering at the church what's going on?
They couldn't even update the required succession planning for who the finance minister would be. Maybe they couldn't put publicly on their website that it was Mark Carney because they had to hide it from Ms. Freeland at the time, but why was Randy Boissonnault on it, the disgraced former ESDC minister?