Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak to this particular bill one more time as this session of Parliament winds down.
Certainly we have had extensive debate on this particular bill. We have had committee of the whole, and we even had a session the other night with one of our colleagues presenting what I thought was one of the better speeches of this particular session, on If I Had a Million Dollars.
I will be a long way from being as entertaining as my colleague from Red Deer—Lacombe, but it is probably helpful to put on the record a number of things this budget would do, and more importantly, what this budget would not do.
First, we have to go back to the election of October 2015. Leading up to that election, our current Prime Minister, who was the Liberal leader at that time, was promising Canadians that we were going to go into debt just a bit, by about $10 billion, to pay for infrastructure, which Canada needs. If this budget had in any way reflected that we were going to go into deficit to spend on infrastructure significantly, I believe that there would have been wider acceptance of this budget. However, to date, what we have seen in infrastructure spending is only about $1 million on the office of the Minister of Infrastructure and Communities.
If what we are going to do with this budget is continue to spend money, and when we create jobs they will be public-sector jobs, that is hardly going to be a budget that will encourage growth in our economy.
As a member of Parliament from a province that has seen incredible growth, growth that is significantly reduced today, I can say that it is not government that makes things happen, and it is not government that creates jobs. It is the private sector. It is unfortunate that in this budget, the current government has taken it upon itself to feel as though it can take Canadians into debt for the next four years, at least, to the tune of about $150 billion, to try to create jobs.
Clearly, it would be my view, and I believe that of most of my colleagues in my caucus, that if we were to work this hard creating a tax structure that created jobs, rather than the government trying to create those jobs, we would be far better off at the end of the four-year mandate. However, it is the current government that will have to answer for that at the end of four years.
Quite honestly, while I do not support this budget in any manner, I believe that it is this kind of budgeting that will ensure that after the next election, we will be rid of the current government and we will have a Conservative government back that will allow the private sector to create jobs.
I want to take a few minutes to look at what this budget would and would not do. As I said, it is a budget that we were promised was going to rebuild Canada. As I say, besides the office of the Minister of Infrastructure and Communities, we have not seen an awful lot of rebuilding in Canada yet.
Again, we have some promises out there. We have heard a lot of good talk. However, there are a lot of needs. When it comes to infrastructure and infrastructure spending, one of the things I am disappointed in is that the current government seems to be again shifting away from the P3 model. In fact, it is probably not using it at all. It is having public servants in Ottawa and elsewhere across the country deciding how best to spend these infrastructure dollars.
Let us be very clear that while this particular budget would take Canadians $30 billion into deficit in this year alone, only $10 billion would be spent on infrastructure over the next two years.
This budget has significantly increased public spending on programs. We have seen it in a number of areas. I am not even going to start to list them, because there are so many. It will create jobs, more public sector jobs, more people who will be working for government. That is not going to create economic growth.
I also want to talk a little about the so-called tax cut the Liberals have in this particular budget. We have heard the parliamentary secretary stand in his place in this Parliament on at least three or four dozen occasions to talk about this middle-income tax cut that is so significant to Canadians. This is how significant it is. It is $1 a day for working Canadians.
I guess the member for Winnipeg North and the parliamentary secretary, because they fall into that middle-income category, feel as though the members of this Parliament should have a tax cut while low-income earners should not get anything, and high-income earners should pay that $1 a day so that the member for Winnipeg North and the parliamentary secretary can have their coffee paid for every morning by the taxpayers of this country.
That tax cut was supposed to be revenue neutral. It took about 24 hours to change that. When the government finally introduced that objective in a motion in this House in December, we found out that the middle-income tax cut that was going to give Canadians $1 a day was going to cost all Canadian taxpayers $1 billion a year. That is hardly revenue neutral.
If we are going to start having tax cuts, they have to be meaningful tax cuts. This so-called middle-income tax cut is hardly meaningful.
At the same time, the government also took away from middle-income Canadians the ability to save in a significantly enhanced tax-free savings account. This is typical of the Liberals' policies: take on one hand, give back with the other, and then turn around and take what they gave back. The net difference is that taxpayers have less in their pockets than they would have had under a Conservative government.
I want to talk a little about retirement and about future plans the government has. Tax-free savings accounts are a way Canadians can save for retirement. What we have now is a Liberal government that has taken away that ability to save via tax-free savings accounts. We also have a Liberal government that is going to be meeting with the provinces on Monday. Let me make this very clear. It is meeting with a whole bunch of Liberal and socialist finance ministers.
We have a finance minister in Alberta who, frankly, is taking our province into much higher debt than the Liberals. It is hard to imagine that there could actually be a government that would go deeper into debt than the Liberals, but come to Alberta, and we will show people one.
Here we have the Minister of Finance meeting with his provincial counterparts on Monday to take more money out of the pockets of taxpayers and more money from small business taxpayers by way of increasing our Canada pension plan contributions.
I happen to sit on the finance committee. I see that my colleague from Gatineau is here today, and he also sits on the finance committee. He has heard the same evidence we have had presented at the finance committee that the number of low-income seniors is down to single digit percentage points.
The government is saying that we need to take more taxes from Canadians, and let us be clear: increased Canada pension plan contributions are a tax on small business and on working Canadians. This Minister of Finance is going to go to Vancouver on Monday and negotiate a deal with his provincial counterparts, almost all of whom are Liberals and socialists, to take more money away from taxpayers and small businesses to solve a problem that, frankly, does not exist.
If the Liberal government had kept the tax policies that were in place under the previous government, if it had left the TFSA alone, that would have allowed Canadians to save money on their own and not have a bigger bureaucracy take money allegedly to have more benefits for Canadians down the road.
In addition, we had an absolutely unthought-out position. Like so many promises that were made by the Liberals during the campaign, we had a Liberal leader running around the country, making a promise at every stop. There was one particular visit where he was not quite sure what to promise, so he said that the Liberals would drop the eligible age for benefits from 67 to 65. I do not think they really thought they would form government, but when they did, they had to try to keep all those promises. This was one promise they should have broken.
Of the litany of promises the government broke, it should have added that to the list of promises broken. There is no way we should be lowering the age from 67 to 65, some 10 years into the future, because that will cost Canadian taxpayers an extra $11 billion a year. Let us just put that into perspective. That is 30% of the equivalent deficit that the government is putting us into right now. There is a campaign promise that should have been broken.
I would like to spend a few more minutes talking about some of the things the government could do, which could be important for my province of Alberta, for the neighbouring provinces of Saskatchewan and British Columbia, and clearly for Newfoundland and Labrador. I would also venture to say that it is important for other Atlantic provinces. I know we have at least a couple of members in the House today from Atlantic Canada. I hope they will take up the challenge of putting pressure on the government to speed up the process and at least give an indication that it will take seriously the hearings that started yesterday on the energy east pipeline. We know that in 2019, if the government decides not to approve that energy east pipeline, members like the member for Saint John will not be sitting in the House because they will be thrown out of office.
Liberals members from British Columbia are also going to have a very difficult time because the Kinder Morgan pipeline to the west coast is absolutely essential for our country.
If the government listens to that socialist mayor of Vancouver and does not listen to Liberal members from British Columbia, who should be advocating on behalf of the Kinder Morgan pipeline, a whole bunch more of them will not be back here in 2019.
I believe the government will make some bad decisions over the next couple of years. It has exhibited that in the first six months of being in office. If it continues to make those bad decision, I will look forward to 2019 when the government can be a Conservative government again, allowing the private sector to create jobs, not driving us into deficit, and not taking money out of the pockets of taxpayers and small businesses.
Let us also put on record that the government broke a promise to small business in Canada. It promised, like all parties in this Parliament did, to reduce the small business tax. It broke that promise. The finance minister came before the finance committee and clearly stated that this promise would not even be considered in the government's mandate.
I could go on for quite some time, but I will allow my friend, the member for Gatineau to ask me a question.