Mr. Speaker, before I begin, I would like to say that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Calgary Shepard.
We have now been exposed to the finance minister's first budget. It contains no surprises. We all knew that the budget would not balance itself. We all knew that the Prime Minister's campaign promise of a $10-billion deficit was, to use parliamentary language, wishful thinking. Now we know the truth. The Liberals are in favour of undisciplined spending, have no plan to balance the books, will fail to boost economic growth, and are raising taxes on families, individuals, and small businesses.
Take, for example, how this budget treats families. Half of all couples with children are at risk of being financially worse off under this new Liberal plan. The new Liberal child benefit plan will support fewer middle-class families than the previous universal child care benefit. Personal income tax is going up, as the government has eliminated income splitting for families. They have cancelled the plan to expand the tax-free savings account, the tax credit for fitness and arts, and tax credits for post-secondary education and textbooks.
This budget does nothing to help small businesses. In fact, it appears designed to hurt them. Keeping the small business tax rate at 10.5% instead of lowering it to the scheduled 9% and ending the hiring credit for small businesses does nothing to support entrepreneurs or the 1.7 million Canadians employed in the manufacturing sector.
By increasing income taxes, the Liberals are making it harder to keep talented workers and innovators in Canada. Raising taxes on businesses will not help the 100,000 Canadians who have recently been laid off in the oil and gas industry. The Liberals are raising taxes on job-creating businesses. The previous Conservative government created a low-tax competitive business environment to drive investment and create hundreds of thousands of private sector jobs.
Let us look at the philosophy behind this budget. Canadians need jobs in these uncertain times to allow for a bit of security. Do the Liberals understand this? Apparently, they do not. Despite the rhetoric about investing in infrastructure and innovation, the budget does little to build infrastructure and invest in innovation. It is really about growing the size of government. Hiring more civil servants is not the best way to grow Canada's economy. When the government spends taxpayers' money, it needs to do so with a purpose. It needs to ensure fiscal responsibility and results. This budget provides for neither.
The Liberals are borrowing four times more money than they promised they would. They are borrowing $30 billion this year alone, and $100 billion over four years combined. The Liberals have no plan to balance the books. They promised that they would balance the budget by 2019. Now they plan to borrow more money every year, with no end in sight. The promise of a small deficit has been replaced by the promise of a colossal deficit, and they hope that the Canadian people will not notice.
Even more disturbing than this huge deficit is the lack of a long-range plan. It is not enough for the government to say it intends to balance the budget at some hypothetical date in the future. Where is the plan to pay back the money that it is borrowing right now, next year, and the year after that to support its reckless spending agenda?
The Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister seem proud to tell us that they will not balance the budget in four years. They hope we will not notice that during that time they will add $150 billion to the national debt, with no plan to pay the money back. That means there will be almost $1 billion more debt in interest alone every year, just to satisfy their urge to spend, spend, spend.
The Prime Minister is very good at saying the Liberals are therefore the middle class, even if he cannot define who is in the middle class. With his budget, his gift to each and every Canadian in the middle class, upper class, or lower class is an additional $818.03 in debt, and that is not counting the interest payments.
With an even larger amount to be added next year, the Liberals are bribing Canadians with their own money and hoping no one will notice when it comes time to pay the bills.
Once again, the government has lost the opportunity to do more than offer political platitudes to unemployed Canadians. It has missed the opportunity to offer support to our energy industry, support that would not cost a dime, by endorsing the energy east pipeline project.
The Prime Minister apparently thinks this is a good time for government to borrow money. The Liberals are going into debt because they can. With no regard to fiscal prudence, they have no idea how to pay the money back. That will be someone else's problem after this government is gone.
Almost all Canadians can agree that getting into debt is easy. Getting out of it is hard. Sadly, there are at least two who do not understand that: the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister. They are determined to crush the country with debt.
How does the budget help individual Canadians? Personal income taxes would be set to go up by $1.3 billion this year and $2.4 billion next year, due to the elimination of income splitting and higher rates on incomes over $200,000. The new Canada child benefit would come at the expense of existing child benefits. At least 10% of families would be losing such support altogether.
Once again, the Liberal record is one of broken promises, whether it is increased spending on palliative care or the elimination of community mailboxes.
When it comes to spending taxpayers' money, the Liberals just cannot help themselves. This debt would need to be paid back by future generations. The government thinks that is fair. After all, our generation is still paying off the deficit spending of previous Liberal governments, so why should our children not be in debt?
At the end of last year, the Liberals had more than $3 billion in the bank. They have blown through that money and now need to break their election promise and borrow even more. Economists say that the Liberals will rack up more than $150 billion in debt over the next four years. This is not a one-year operation. This is the beginning of years of deficits, a mortgage on our country's future.
At some point the Liberals will reluctantly come to the conclusion that budgets really do not balance themselves. Such statements are either wishful thinking or fiscal ignorance. How would they deal with this deficit? How would they pay for their spending schemes? The Liberals would raise taxes even more for hard-working Canadian families and job-creating businesses.
Job-creating businesses will not invest in Canada if they do not know the cost of doing business. Saddling businesses with higher taxes, changing the rules of the game when they are not looking, and handing borrowed money from one politician to another will not create jobs.
More than 100,000 Canadians from across the country are out of work in the oil and gas industry alone. The budget offers them no hope for their future, no admission that our energy industry is key to our overall economic health. We know the recipe for job creation. It is low taxes, low red tape, open competition, free trade, successful businesses, and responsible spending of taxpayers' money. That is what the government should focus on. Instead, what we have is platitudes and promises. That is not good enough, unless one is a Liberal.