Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise on behalf of my constituents to talk about Bill C-29.
The first thing I note about Bill C-29, a second act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament, is that it is an omnibus bill. In terms of size, it is 230 pages of omnibus legislation. I remember well when the member for Beauséjour was the House leader for the Liberals and they were the third party in the House, how he used to rail against bills of this size. It did not matter what was in them; it was the fact they were omnibus bills that created so much angst.
The member for Winnipeg North made a career in the last Parliament out of railing against omnibus legislation. It was said to be dastardly thing for a government to choose to implement its budget via a budget implementation act. That is what is happening today. We are talking about an omnibus budget bill. I guess the principles and policies the Liberals had when they used to sit in the third party seats change a little when they cross over to the government side. Now they are a big fan of omnibus bills. That was the first thing I wanted to mention.
This bill is supposed to be the plan to implement the budget. The government clearly has no plan when it comes to budgeting. During the election campaign, Liberals promised there would be a $10 billion deficit that would be paid back within the mandate of a majority government. How long did it take them to abandon that promise? Was it 10 minutes?
I remember Prime Minister Stephen Harper saying that the Liberals' position was that everyone should trust that it would be a modest, little deficit. How right he was. We are going to hear today at four o'clock just how much more than a $10 billion deficit the government has blown in less than a year. The fiscal update will show that the government is, by a magnitude of at least three times, past its initial deficit target. It misled Canadians during the election and has blown through it.
What do Liberals have to show for it? I would argue they have nothing to show for it. There is no increased growth and there are zero net new jobs. The parliamentary budget officer has confirmed that there are zero net new jobs as a result of $30 billion or so of borrowed money being spent. This was supposed to stimulate the economy and take us to untold heights. The Liberals have done nothing they promised and have blown through their deficit target, so they have no budget plan. The plan is just to borrow more money and spend it. Canadians know that debt has to be repaid, that borrowed money has to be paid back. If my generation does not repay it, it will be our children and grandchildren who get this bill, because eventually it will come due.
One of my constituents, a small businessman, has certainly seen that the Liberal government is no friend of his. He told me the government is like a teenager who has one parent who provides him with a credit card with no limit on it, and that parent is very popular, but the other parent who hands the credit card bill to the teenager and says it is his to pay back is the less popular parent. Right now, the Liberals are playing the role of the sugar daddy who hands out the cash, but what Canadians will soon realize is that the bill will be paid by them. That is clearly what is happening.
What have the Liberals done in less than a year? They borrowed $30 billion, as I said, and they have also misled small businesses. All parties agreed that the small business tax rate would be lowered from 11% to 9%. How long did it take the Liberals to break that promise? It was broken in their first budget. They broke their promise to small businesses, and I think we know why.
During the election campaign, the Prime Minister made it clear that there were an awful lot of people who were using small businesses to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. That is what the Prime Minister said about the industry that creates the most jobs in this country. He said that small business was just a tax avoidance scheme. We found out during the election campaign that he has set up some of those companies himself to avoid paying a lot of taxes, so perhaps he knew what he spoke of. However, that is not what was promised to small businesses.
I spoke earlier this month in the House about Bill C-26, a bill dealing with CPP rates. Again, that would do nothing for seniors. It would do nothing for people approaching retirement. In fact, the finance minister has admitted that it would do nothing for anyone for more than 40 years. However, what it would do is reduce the incomes of Canadian families by up to $2,200. That $2,200 is taken from the paycheques of Canadians to go into a fund they likely will never be able to access. That is in addition to the $1,100 coming out of the pockets of small businesses who are paying their portion of that tax.
So they are increasing taxes on small businesses. They are also increasing taxes on Canadians through a carbon tax.
I was honoured to be given the role of critic for natural resources. Since the government has taken office, over 100,000 energy workers have lost their jobs. What do we see from the government? We see no jobs plan. We see no lifeline to families in the energy sector. Instead, we see them being thrown an anchor, the anchor of a carbon tax.
What would that do? The member for Oshawa talked about what it would do for manufacturing.
I will tell members what it would do for the energy sector. It would put an already crippled energy sector at an even greater disadvantage vis-à-vis the people we are trading with, the U.S., which has no intention of implementing a federal carbon tax any time soon. They are our major customer.
When we moved a motion at the natural resources committee to have the Liberal members tell us what analysis they have done to show what impact the carbon tax would have on the natural resource sector, they voted against it. We know why. It is because they have not done any economic analysis of that impact. They do not care. They do not care about those 100,000 family-supporting jobs that have been lost. We have seen they do not care about that sector because they continue to layer regulatory burden after regulatory burden upon a sector that is already suffering. When there are pipelines to be approved, they do not allow for evidence-based scientific policy to take place. They layer on an extra political layer in which the minister will make the final decision, in which the cabinet will make the final decision, in which red tape is layered upon an already burdensome process. That would do nothing to protect public safety. It would simply add to the regulatory burden.
The government is fond of saying how it has cut the taxes of middle-class Canadians. It is just not true.
The average income of people in my riding is under $40,000 a year. Guess how much they receive from the income tax cuts from the Liberal Party? Zero. They receive nothing. The most vulnerable, low-income Canadians got nothing from the Liberal tax cuts, while people like members of Parliament, who make up to $150,000 a year, get the most benefit one could possibly get out of that tax cut. The Liberals have done nothing for an average family in Chilliwack—Hope with that tax cut, and anything they have done for some families, they are going to tax back with the extra carbon tax and additional payroll taxes. Canadians are not better off.
They also cancelled things like the child fitness tax credit, the child arts tax credit, and tax credits for textbooks. They said that is because they do not like to complicate the Income Tax Act. They do not like those boutique tax credits, they said, that help families, that help moms and dads put kids in sports and in dance lessons. However, what they do like are boutique tax credits for talk show hosts for Canadian shows, or for someone who needs to take a first aid course. They are all for those tax cuts. It does not seem to matter, as long it's not a family, as long as it is not people supporting their children. We do not want to support people like that. However, if people are creators of content, then they need a tax break from the Government of Canada.
Their priorities are wrong. They are not looking after Canadian families. They are looking after special interests. We have certainly seen that over the last little while, with the revelations about their fundraising practices, in which they are meeting with the well-heeled insiders they regulate, who are giving them money for access. It is not the right way to go. This is not a budget plan, and we cannot support it.