Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to add some comments and observations for Canadians following this debate on the latest federal budget.
I think the question Canadians are asking and to which they are getting a variety of answers is whether this a good budget for Canada. Some people say yes, some people say no.
I would like to address that question and give some observations I hope will be of some assistance as we evaluate, as Canadians, whether this is the way we want our finances managed. The budget was summed up in a newspaper headline that I read the day after its presentation. It read: "Canadians left sitting on a ticking time bomb". The time bomb is the debt. Canadians owe a mortgage on the country of over $600 billion.
Most of us do not compute in terms of billions of dollars. It would be helpful if we talked a bit about how much $1 billion is. Canadians might want to be aware that $1 billion is so big that if one spent $1,000 every day since the birth of Christ one would not yet have spent $1 billion.
If you made $1 per second, Mr. Speaker-and I know some people think you do but I know it is not so-you would be a millionaire in just 11 days and it would take 33 years to become a billionaire.
A billion dollars is a great deal of money. Yet the government has borrowed or put us in the hole for another hundred billion dollars in the very short time it has been in charge of our fiscal affairs, a hundred billion dollars that we have to pay interest on every year, a hundred billion dollars that we will have to pay back some day, a hundred billion dollars added to the mortgage on the future of our children and our grandchildren. In my mind it is a very big burden for Canadians to be saddled with.
The government likes to talk about having cut the amount of money it has been borrowing. Yet it is interesting to note that its total spending has been cut a minuscule 1.8 per cent over the time of its stewardship.
The interest we have to pay on our debt has risen considerably from $38 billion when the government took office to a forecasted $48 billion next year. That is another $10 billion that we have to pay to our lenders. It is $10 billion that we cannot put into an ailing health care system. It is $10 billion that we cannot use to educate our young people so that we can be internationally competitive. It is $10 billion that we have to take away from job creators. It is $10 billion more that we have to pay, pull out of our jeans, than we did before to service the country's staggering debt. We have one of the highest debt to production ratios in the industrialized world.
What does that mean? The simple reality is that we will need not less but more money for services in coming years. In 20 years time people like me, baby boomers of whom there are a great number, will be retiring. They will be demanding the pensions they have been promised and have been paying into. They will be demanding and needing extra health care and other senior services. The demand for these things will increase dramatically within the next 20 years.
The only way to prepare for it is to run surpluses now and reduce the debt as quickly as possible so that the government has the flexibility to meet the needs of the future crowd of seniors who will soon be retiring. This is not happening. In fact our debt load is increasing by $24 billion of the billions of dollars I was talking about earlier. It is a lot of money to borrow, to go in the hole in one short year.
The younger generations will be saddled with an unprecedented burden. Not only will they have to pay for health care programs, putting something away for retirement, educating their children, helping those who are disadvantaged and needy and supporting the activities of government. They will also have to pay a staggering amount of money every year on the billions of dollars the government has so cavalierly borrowed and spent, the $24 billion this year. The finance minister is borrowing and spending about what we take in and the younger generations will be saddled with that.
A paper released earlier this month by the Institute for Research on Public Policy in Montreal showed that under the fiscal policy of the finance minister a baby born today will pay $131,000 more in taxes than he receives in benefits from the government over his lifetime.
For the first time the government made no prediction in the budget about the unemployment rate. One is led to conclude the government must feel pretty negative about the job situation to have had to take job projection numbers out of its budget.
Much has been made of the fact there are no tax rate increases in the budget although the government will take in more tax money this year than it did last year. One citizen observed: "I cannot pay the taxes I have already paid so no new taxes does not mean much to me. I need a job".
High taxes and payments to lenders as a result of the wild borrowing that has taken place over the last 30 years are doing two things to the economy. First it is destroying job opportunities. When job creators have to pay a large amount of their incomes to government they are unable to use the money to create jobs, to expand their businesses and to take advantage of export opportunities. High taxes and payments to lenders are also eroding our social services. We see evidence of that every day. We also see evidence of the concerns of citizens in that regard.
In the last two and a half years the Liberal government has increased the tax take from Canadians by $8.8 billion. Notwithstanding this enormous tax increase a balanced budget is still nowhere in sight.
On one hand the finance minister expects Canadians to take more personal action to plan and save for their retirement. On the other hand he makes taking such action more and more costly for Canadians. They can now only hold RRSP moneys until age 69 and RRSP management fees can no longer be deducted.
The finance minister has continued to freeze the contribution limit on RRSPs to $13,500 a year even though it was promised to be raised in 1995 to a level that would allow a reasonable rate of retirement income. Worst of all, there is no target or plan to get to a surplus position which would allow tax reductions, a systematic debt pay down and flexibility in our important social programs.
We have some real concerns about the budget. I would answer the question on whether the budget is good for Canadians with a resounding no. I urge the government to set realistic targets as quickly as possible to eliminate the deficit, to quit borrowing money, to quit spending more than we take in, to get to a surplus position, and to protect the social programs that we need and the economic future of the country.