Madam Chair, again I would like to remind you that the minister should be confined to three minutes of questions, answers, and remarks, as per the Standing Orders of this House.
The appointment of this finance minister marks the end of fiscal prudence and a new era of reckless spending and borrowing. When he went to the voters in the election, his party did not promise open-ended spending. Voters did not give him a blank cheque and a mandate to spend as much as he wants, for as long as he wants, on whatever he wants.
The finance minister and his party promised that their spending would be constrained and governed by a clear set of fiscal anchors. They made those promises on the campaign trail. They wrote them into their platform. They were reiterated in the finance minister's mandate letter when he was appointed.
Since he seems to have forgotten his mandate from the voters and the Prime Minister, allow me to remind him of what he was instructed in his mandate letter. It states:
In particular, I will expect you to work with your colleagues and through established legislative, regulatory, and Cabinet processes, including our first Budget, to deliver on your top priorities.
What were those top priorities that he was supposed to deliver on and include in his first budget? The number one priority in his mandate letter was as follows:
Ensure that our fiscal plan is sustainable by meeting our fiscal anchors of balancing the budget in 2019/20 and continuing to reduce the federal debt-to-GDP ratio throughout our mandate.
Apparently, those campaign promises and that mandate letter were not worth the paper they were written on, because the finance minister went straight to work on a plan that will do the exact opposite. He is operating each of these fiscal anchors, and he has completely abandoned any semblance of a sustainable fiscal plan. He started spending right away, booking billions of dollars into the 2015-16 fiscal year. He went to work writing a budget that will raise the debt-to-GDP ratio this year, not lower it. He immediately gave up on his responsibility to balance the budget. He is now planning for multi-billion dollar, open-ended borrowing every year for the next five years, with no end in sight.
The government is repealing Canada's Federal Balanced Budget Act, which would have required it to give a clear rationale for its borrowing and present a plan to bring a balanced budget. It is replacing it with nothing. Even the IMF raised concerns about this in its report on Canada last month. It knows it is dangerous when a country has no fiscal anchor.
The government is wasting Canada's fiscal advantage and saddling the taxpayers of this country and their children with over $100 billion in new debt. This is at a time when we are not in a recession and when the economy is growing. This is a time when provincial debt is skyrocketing and global financial markets remain volatile. Such an approach is completely irresponsible. He is weakening Canada's ability to deal with a major economic crisis or shock, and he continues to justify his spending on a series of arguments that are completely out of line with the facts. Even worse, he does not even seem to care.
I have some questions for the finance minister about his reckless approach to managing the finances of our country.
The minister and his government like to blame the economy for the fact that they are borrowing four times more than they planned over the next four years. How does the minister explain the fact that the PBO's recent budget analysis found that spending increases, not revenue decreases, are responsible for more than two-thirds of the projected deficits over the next two years?