Madam Speaker, unlike the previous speaker, who was a work of fiction, I will be a work of fact. I am going to chronicle how our party has come to the position of losing confidence in the government. It is an interesting exercise.
In 1993 we took over from the Mulroney government. At that point, there was a $42 billion deficit that had accumulated over the eight or nine years of the Mulroney government. Each and every year, that government ran a deficit and added to the national debt. At the end of 1993, when the government changed, Mr. Martin and Mr. Chrétien had a nasty little surprise and it took them about four years to dig out from that hole.
The election of 1997 was a critical election. We barely held on to a majority government because of the decisions that Mr. Martin and Mr. Chrétien had to make with respect to getting the nation's finances under control. Thereafter, we ran about 10 years of surpluses and paid down the national debt significantly.
That is how we got to the change of government in 2006. In 2006 we had a nice little gift for the incoming government: a $13 billion surplus. It immediately took it without any thanks and added it to its own little rhetoric. The history is made of Conservative deficits and Liberal surpluses, and here we are four years later into the most massive deficit that this nation has ever experienced.
How did we get from there to here? One would have to work at it. The first deficit was not actually this year. It was last year, for the fiscal year beginning March 2008 and ending in March 2009. It was a $6 billion deficit. In two short years, excluding the year it inherited from the Liberal Party, the government was into deficit again. Things were back to the good old Mulroney years where spending could not be controlled, the revenue base was reduced and, Bob's your uncle, we were into deficit.
One of the reasons why it does not seem to be able to walk away from its fixation with deficits is that it does not seem to be able to control its spending. Many commentators were making the observation that the revenue base cannot be flatlined while expenditures were simultaneously running at a 7% or 8% increase on an annual basis. Revenues were being flatlined by the government.
In any household, we cannot carry on spending more money than we take in unless we run up the debt. That is what we are doing here. We are running up debt. The first deficit was not this year. The first deficit was last year. Now, we are into some rather massive amounts of deficit.
It is kind of interesting to quote the Prime Minister on these sorts of things. Apparently, in September of last year, he said that there would not be a recession in Canada and that we would be fine as long as we did not do stupid things such as running a deficit. That was only September 2008.
In October he suggested that the market represented good buying opportunities for Canadians. In November, exactly a year ago, his failed economic statement promised a surplus for the next five years.
The government projected a surplus for the next five years. Finally, it was up to the Bank of Canada to tell Canadians, because the Prime Minister would not, that we were in recession in November of last year. By December, after a bit of a political crisis, he admitted that he would probably be running a deficit in the order of $20 billion to $30 billion. In the budget that was passed in January, it projected a deficit of $34 billion.
That was then and this is now, and $34 billion became $54 billion, $54 billion became $56 billion, and we still have not finished the fiscal year end and we do not know what the deficit will be.
It is a pretty impressive list of incompetent statements, possibly even misleading statements, and it speaks to the issue of confidence. If I stop right there, people may say that maybe the Liberals actually have it right and maybe they should not have confidence in the government. Indeed, that is the situation. We have ceased to have confidence in the government, and this litany of incompetence and misleading information just keeps on keeping on.
Then the excuse has become that it is a worldwide recession and because it is a worldwide recession and because all of these other countries need to stimulate the economy, we need to do the same thing. We in the Liberal Party say that is possibly a good idea, but only if it is a timely stimulus with, as the phrase goes, shovels in the ground. Stimulus two, three or four years from now is actually useless. Stimulus now and stimulus in the last number of months, when the economy was shrinking is, in theory and in practice, a useful exercise. We agreed that if we stimulated the economy with a temporary deficit, then fine, let us do it, and maybe we will ride through the recession as best we can.
That was the theory going into it, and then suddenly a whole bunch of Conservative cheques started raining down on the heads of Canadians, Conservative cheques with Conservative logos and Conservative MPs, and Conservative signatures. We had signs and cheques, and cheques and signs, et cetera. Clearly, the thing that has been most stimulated in the last few months has been the sign making industry and the cheque writing industry. However, it does not seem to have had really any impact on the economy.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer was asked to see whether he could establish whether the stimulus money that had been injected into the economy would have any impact, any real and measurable impact on the economy. First, he was sort of stonewalled. He asked and asked and did not get any response. Then after a period of asking and asking, he got 4,000 pages of incoherent documentation dumped on his lap and was told to figure it out. He said that was an unacceptable disclosure and asked for electronic formatted material. Apparently the government is unable or more likely unwilling to actually produce the numbers and disclosure with respect to the stimulus projects in any kind of fashion that would allow a coherent analysis.
It is one thing for the Government of Canada to stonewall the opposition. It is another thing altogether for the Government of Canada to stonewall the Parliamentary Budget Officer. That is exactly what it is doing. That is essentially an insult by the government to every member of Parliament in this chamber.
Let me read from the Parliamentary Budget Officer's observations with respect to the attempt to get information. He puts it in much better language than I could. He points out that we have uneven information regarding the implementation process, relevant benchmark outputs and expected outcomes of measures of the stimulus package. Uneven information, what does that mean? Unmeasurable outcomes of the stimulus package: inconsistent in its presentation, some measures have been dropped or renamed; lack appropriate disclosures regarding major components of the stimulus package, including infrastructure spending. What does that mean? The only thing that it can mean is that 4,000 pages were dumped on his desk and he was told to figure it out.
If the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who is an officer of the Parliament of Canada set up by Parliament, is unable to discern whether stimulus has actually worked in this country, it does not lie in the mouths of government members, particularly the parliamentary secretary, who say that everything is wonderful and it is all working. There is no way to tell whether it is working.
The parliamentary secretary went on at great length about the home renovation tax credit and all that sort of stuff. He could not tell the NDP member who asked if it was actually working whether it was working or not. He cannot tell whether it has had any impact at all. The only thing he knows for sure is that the government has run up the deficit by $56 billion. That is the only thing that is a factual truth.
The hon. parliamentary secretary, and I assume Conservative speakers who will follow, will talk at great length about how this stimulus package is working, yet the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who is an officer here to serve us, cannot tell. Nobody can tell.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer then goes on to say that we should compare how the Americans disclose their stimulus package with how Canadians disclose theirs. The U.S. has a recovery, accountability and transparency board. Canada does not.
With respect to government-wide reporting, the U.S. has quarterly reporting on oversight and quarterly reporting on economic impact by the council of economic advisers. Here, we get a note from Finance Canada once every three months. There are agency recovery websites, agency recovery aid plans, agency IG recovery work plans in the United States. Canada has nothing. The U.S. has program specific recovery act plans and other activity reporting tied to agency level reporting. We have nothing. Recipient reporting, risk management reporting, award level reporting, all of that is available in the U.S. We have nothing.
When hon. members on the government benches say that stimulus is working, we on the Liberal side of the House will have to be pardoned for saying we have no confidence in what the Conservatives say about the effectiveness of stimulus. If the Parliamentary Budget Officer cannot analyze it, and if the government will not disclose it, then it does not exist. But it gets worse.
We have chronic deficits as far as we can see. We cannot measure the effect of stimulus. Then, in this morning's paper, there is a report which says that unemployment is at its highest point in 11 years.
The Globe and Mail states:
The recession has killed hundreds of thousands of jobs in Canada since employment peaked last October, with the jobless rate hitting an 11-year high of 8.7 per cent. More than 1.6 million Canadians are now out of work, with the steepest job losses among factory workers, though no sector has been spared.
There we have it. We have run up a huge tab on the government's dime, which is really our dime. We have chronic deficits as far as we can see. We cannot measure whether stimulus works or does not work, and unemployment is at the highest level in 11 years.
I do not know what would be required to turn one from confidence to a lack of confidence, but those seem to be rather fundamental parts of being in government. The government has to be able to run the fiscal framework of the nation. It cannot spend more than it takes in. It cannot run up the deficit endlessly.
We need to be able to measure the stimulus effects, where they are, how effective they are and whether they have impacted the economy. We want a recovery where the jobs are there and people are available to do them.
What do we have? We have a jobless recovery, if there is a recovery at all. We have a huge run-up in our deficit. We have a Parliamentary Budget Officer who has been stoned each and every day when he has asked for more information.
It is a pretty damning indictment of the competence of the government. I do not quite know how the parliamentary secretary will face his constituents. He will a lot of explaining to do to the folks in Alberta, who are generally of a Conservative persuasive, that he has run the bills up by $175 billion. Then he will have this cute little argument that the government paid down an amount of debt. The government only paid down about $39 billion of which $13 billion was left over from the Conservative government. Therefore, it has not done much of a job. Net, the government is probably up about $130 billion to $140 billion in debt.
Let us hope that the Governor of the Bank of Canada can keep the lid on the rates. I do not know if he can always do that. It is pretty low right now and we are pretty fortunate. Having racked up and anticipating racking up more and more debt, if the rates take off, then the problems of the government will pale in comparison to either inflation or the cost of borrowing.
It is pretty difficult to express confidence in a government that cannot control its spending, flatlines its revenues, runs up the debt, taxes the futures of our children, cannot and will not tell us whether stimulus actually impacts the economy and has an unemployment rate that is starting to go through the ceiling.
Forgive me if I express a lack of confidence in the government. The litany of incompetence, the litany of misleading information and this relentless propaganda machine that comes from across the other way would do credit to a totalitarian regime. There were $100 million spent on telling Canadians what good, fine folks the Conservatives were. Meanwhile the debt is through the ceiling, unemployment is rising and the government cannot tell us whether stimulus works.
I appreciate the opportunity to express this lack of confidence in the government.