Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to participate in the debate on Bill C-15, an act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 22 and other measures.
Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Calgary Shepard.
A budget is a demonstration of a government's priorities, a reflection of its vision, so to speak. Yet, despite borrowing almost $30 billion this year, budget 2016 is missing a pronounced emphasis on putting in place the conditions that support long-term growth in the wealth and prosperity of all Canadians.
In less than six months, the Liberals have taken Canada from a budget surplus to a massive deficit. The finance ministerhas been asked countless times whether running a deficit three times larger than what he campaigned on is a breach of his contract with Canadians, but the Prime Minister, the Minister of Finance, and his parliamentary secretary have simply refused to answer the question.
If the finance minister is so proud of this budget and the massive deficit experiment he has taken Canada into, he should be willing to tell Canadians that his campaign promise was not worth the paper it was written on, and why.
Once again Finance Canada confirmed that, from April 2015 to February 2016, the Government of Canada ran a budgetary surplus of $7.5 billion.
It is worth repeating over and over.
The Liberals inherited a balanced budget and an economy that was growing. Thus, the over-$113 billion in additional debt that Canada will incur over the next four years is entirely the choice of the Prime Minister and his Minister of Finance. It is their duty to explain this decision to break their promises and the additional debt charges that Canadian taxpayers will have to pay, going forward. The “Canada is back” statement that the Prime Minister likes to pronounce just about everywhere he goes is certainly true. Canada is back—back to the 1970s and the early 1980s where the Liberal government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau ran deficits, in adjusted dollars, starting in 1975: $27 billion; $28 billion; $41 billion; $46 billion; $43 billion; $41 billion; $29 billion; and, finally, $72 billion in his final budget of 1983.
If deficit spending is indeed the path to long-term economic growth, as the government claims it is, former prime minister Chrétien would not have had to cut transfer payments to my home province of Saskatchewan by 15% in 1995 because 33¢ of every dollar collected had to go to public debt charges, and the government could not afford to do anything else.
While it is true that the budget was finally balanced again in 1997-1998, it took deep cuts in transfers to the provinces to do so. The budget did not balance itself; revenues did not grow at a faster rate than spending.
Bill C-15 also represents the return to an activist federal government that believes it has all the solutions; in other words, big government that knows best. The Liberal plan to create jobs is to increase direct payments to individuals and then pay for these transfers by borrowing money. The plan for the struggling sectors of western Canada's economy is to provide a temporary bump in employment insurance, rather than removing barriers to getting resources to market, which would create real new jobs; and the Liberals did not even get that right.
More to the point, western Canadians do not want a government handout. They want a federal government that supports the west because we have a dynamic and innovative economy that is temporarily struggling due to a drop in demand for goods.
The Liberal government could, at the very least, attempt to do no harm to the energy sector, but instead, it plans to impose additional regulatory red tape.
On another front, the government did not even bother to hide its dislike of small business, or any business for that matter, in this budget. In the finance minister's budget speech, the word “government” was mentioned nearly 40 times, while “business” received just six mentions.
The finance minister's actions have, unfortunately, matched his talk. He is reversing a four-year phased decline of the small business tax rate, which will cost small businesses nearly $900 million per year.
The Minister of Small Business and Tourism has attempted to justify this tax hike by trying to make the implausible claim that small businesses will benefit from the government's new social programs because, presumably, folks will have more money to spend.
The Minister of Small Business and Tourism should know that taxes are an expense that is passed on to the consumer through higher prices. Higher prices make Canadian goods less competitive, should a company try to find new customers outside Canada. More and more, small businesses are competing continentally and internationally, and this tax hike ignores that reality. It makes good sense to give small businesses every chance to succeed at home and abroad by reducing their tax burden.
I know that many Liberal members are excited about their first budget. However, I would caution those members that governments cannot borrow money in perpetuity to pay for their spending sprees. As I noted earlier, over the next four years the Liberals intend to borrow over $110 billion. Over that same period, the Government of Canada will have to pay approximately that same amount in interest on its debt. While this Liberal government likes to say that now is the time to spend money because interest rates are low and Canada's debt-to-GDP ratio is among the lowest in the world, this statement is fraught with problems for a number of reasons.
First, despite Canada having comparably low federal government debt levels compared to other countries, at present nearly 10¢ of every dollar spent by the federal government goes toward paying the interest on our debt, which was largely accrued during the 1970s and 1980s. That 10% of every dollar spent by the federal government going to pay interest on debt is money that does absolutely nothing for Canadians today.
Second, when combined with provincial debt, total government debt in Canada is at $1.2 trillion, or over $34,000 for every man, woman, and child living in Canada.
Third, Canada's population is aging. Every year, more Canadians are retiring than are joining the workforce. In a few short years, as the baby boom generation retires, Canada will face a shortage of taxpayers to support the pensions and benefits of retirees. Consequently, the fact that Canada is in a sound fiscal position is not a reason to step back and return to the 1990s, when The Wall Street Journal called Canada an honorary member of the third world. Rather, we should continue to lessen our debt burden, which will reduce our monthly public debt charges, and then either pass those savings on to Canadians or put that money back into our economy in the form of long-term durable infrastructure without having to raise taxes. Unfortunately, we are seeing the exact opposite.
Bill C-15 would make substantive changes to PPP Canada by allowing this crown corporation to sell or otherwise dispose of all or substantially all of its assets. As the government has already moved PPP Canada from Finance Canada to Infrastructure Canada, I can only speculate that the Liberal Party is planning to get rid of this corporation and transfer its funding to Infrastructure Canada. PPP Canada has received $2.4 billion in funding since 2007, and it has disbursed this in an efficient manner for water, public transit, local road, and green energy infrastructures, and so on. Funded projects include a new bus depot in Saskatoon, a biosolids energy centre in Victoria, a road expansion in Winnipeg, and a housing renewal project in Vancouver, just to name a few. These are exactly the types of infrastructure projects the Liberals say they support; yet it appears they are about to gut a program that is getting money out the door for good projects, simply because they are not able to dictate which ones will be funded. I hope one of the Liberal members across the way can provide more clarity on the intent of allowing PPP Canada to dispose of all its assets, during our opportunity to question them.
In conclusion, together with my colleagues on this side of the House, I will continue to demand a real plan to create jobs, and fight to keep more money in the pockets of hard-working Canadians