Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Victoria.
It is an honour to rise today and speak in response to the budget introduced by the government in the House last week. Over the last four years, as a member of Parliament, I have learned one thing for sure: Conservatives and the Prime Minister are not nearly the economic managers they seem to think they are. In fact, time and time again, the government chose precisely the opposite. The Conservatives have shown us, and Canadians, just how incompetent they can be as managers of the economy. The government has dropped the ball on so many incredibly important files. We just have to look at the F-35.
Conservatives must have a good supply of pixie dust to use on unsuspecting Canadians if they think they can pass this budget off as sound economic planning. Of course, this is backstopped by at least a $13-million advertising budget, using Canadians' money, which they are going to spend on propelling themselves into the election.
I had to laugh last week when my colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley said this in his response to the budget:
They spent the surplus before they had it. Then they panicked....They didn't know what to do because the economy was not performing the way they had hoped. One would think that planning more than praying would be [the norm] within the finance department, but not under [this government].
My esteemed colleague could not have been more correct.
How else do we explain a budget that is predicated on such a shallow set of priorities and planning principles, with so little regard for thinking things through? How else could one explain draining the contingency fund so that in the short term it looks like we are not in a deficit? Of course, dropping that from $3 billion to $1 billion means that any unforeseen event that could take place would actually bring the government back into the red. We just have to look at last year to some of the events that happened. We had the ice storm in Toronto. We had tremendous flooding in Alberta and in Toronto. There were also other weather events that cost the economy, and certainly cost the provinces and the federal government, billions of dollars. The contingency fund is there for good reason, to protect against unforeseen events.
We also saw the fire sale of our government's interest in General Motors. We all understand that the government was not supposed to hold on to these shares in perpetuity. However, one of the simple staples of investing in stocks is to buy low and sell high. What the government has done in selling the shares at this time is actually costing $3.5 billion. It sold the shares at a net loss of $3.5 billion. It is as if every single Canadian across the country had a $100 bill to begin with, took it out of their pocket and set it on fire. That is $100 for every Canadian that the government has wasted in order to say it has a balanced budget.
These things are very questionable, and not just in my opinion, but in the opinion of many economists on both sides of the political spectrum.
Much more importantly, I want to talk about the changes the government is making to tax-free savings accounts. These changes really represent just how cynical and crass the government can be and how shallow and short-sighted its economic policy really is. The Conservatives are going to change the maximum allowable contributions for TFSAs to up to $10,000 a year. Who does this help? We have heard from the government that millions of Canadians have TFSAs.