Mr. Speaker, it is unfortunate that I did not get under the wire for my 20 minutes, but I will try to keep my comments confined to 10.
I am pleased to speak to the budget implementation act, but I would like to create a bit of context before I get into a couple of details contained within it. In the 2015 election campaign, the Liberals made specific promises to Canadians. They promised that they would have tiny deficits of $10 billion a year and that they would get back to balanced budgets during their time in office. They also indicated that dollars would be spent predominantly on infrastructure in the provinces and territories.
The first thing we have to recognize is that everything they have done since, in terms of the budget and budget implementation acts, has violated their promise to Canadians. The Liberals made a promise about what they were going to do with respect to deficits and how they were going to spend Canadians' money. That was an important promise, and it is shameful that they are breaking that promise.
The Liberals are breaking their promise at a time when it is not necessary. I will acknowledge that had the economy been struggling, they might have had to provide a bit of stimulus. However, they took office with a surplus budget and a growing economy. The Liberals are quite proud to say that the economy is going well, so why do they need to spend all of this extra money? That is an important place to start.
There are three areas that the government directly controls. It controls the creation of an environment that would be positive for jobs, opportunity, and growth. It controls bringing money into its coffers through our tax system, and it obviously controls how to spend that money. I would suggest that these three functions need to be carefully aligned. In this budget, which deals predominantly with the expenditure side of things, the government is completely out of alignment with the other three features. We need an environment that is going to create success. We need a fair tax system, and we need to have a reasonable spending plan.
I would like to touch briefly on tax generation. Not only do the Liberals want this $20 billion deficit with no plan for getting back to balanced budgets, but they are desperately looking for ways to get more money. The interesting thing is that they have floated out a whole bunch of ideas, but they have never done anything that would impact the personal wealth of the Prime Minister, the finance minister, or their Liberal friends who are enjoying some tax benefits that most of us do not enjoy.
The small business tax was an idea that was floated out by the Liberals. It would have hurt our small businesses in terms of how they dealt with passive income and how they would grow their companies. However, the Liberals did nothing with respect to tax avoidance schemes that are used by their wealthy friends.
The Liberals floated out the idea of taxing the health benefits of teachers who make $80,000 a year, yet they are not going to worry about shares that are held in a company like Morneau Shepell and the finance minister's introduction of legislation around pensions.
The Liberals also talked about taxing employee discounts. They realized that the accounting nightmare of charging taxes on the value of a Big Mac would be a little over the top, so they walked away from that idea very quickly.
The Liberals are denying disability tax credits to people who have diabetes. They said they would hire more nurses who would review the paperwork that has already been done by doctors and nurse practitioners. They were considering hiring nurses for the Canada Revenue Agency to review the paperwork, so they could justify their denial of disability tax credits for diabetics.
Free advice for the government would be that it perhaps should be spending those dollars for nurses on more people to look at tax havens and tax-avoidance issues. Very clearly, there is one set of rules for the Prime Minister and his friends and another set of rules for the rest of us.
I will now go to tax expenditures, the other part of the budget. I will start small and work up to some of the larger issues. Money matters. How Liberals spend hard-earned tax dollars really matters. I have some examples of how they are choosing to spend money. If people were to walk a one-kilometre circle in this area, they would see a cup, which apparently cost $2.5 million. It is some sort of structure sitting on Sparks Street. They have chosen to build a $5-million hockey rink. If people were to walk a little further, they would know that City Hall has a beautiful skating rink all year round, but Liberals chose to spend $5 million for a hockey rink that I believe is going to be open for about a month.
Just yesterday, we heard that $10 million is going to a private business to build a Club Med in Quebec. There are many in my riding who would say that if the government is going to subsidize and support the resort industry, there are many who be very happy to be at the table and receive $10 million. However, there was a reason, when Conservatives were in government, that we did not do that kind of thing. It was because we did not believe that kind of corporate handout was to the benefit of anyone.
I have to speak about something in this particular bill that I have had no reasonable explanation for. Nothing has been said by the Liberal government that gives me any comfort that this will be money well spent. That, of course, is the half a billion dollars going to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. That is in division 5, part 2. The original explanation from the finance minister's communications person was that this is going to create jobs here at home and will help the middle class. What fantasy world would someone have to live in to believe that giving half a billion dollars to an Asian infrastructure bank that is building bridges and roads in Asia is going to create jobs here at home and help the middle class? I would note that if there were opportunities abroad, Canadians are not precluded from bidding on those jobs anyway. There has been no reasonable explanation for that half a billion dollars. When I was in Yellowknife not so long ago, I saw a huge need for infrastructure there.
This leaves me a couple of minutes to talk about creating an environment for success. The north is a great example. It created a moratorium on oil and gas drilling and decided to turn significant areas into parks. The premier of the Northwest Territories said that southerners want all of the north to be their park. Southerners are taking away their dreams and hopes, and creating a nightmare for them. They are putting a carbon tax on them and they are going to be not only the most impacted by climate change, but the ones most impacted by a carbon tax, with nothing to support the impact that is going to have. They are taking away jobs and opportunities, imposing additional costs, and destroying a community.
In conclusion, I suggest that the budget implementation act is a follow-through on broken promises from an election campaign. It would go after law-abiding small businesses to grab dollars wherever the Liberals can and create an increasingly negative climate for investment. Although there may be a couple of measures that are reasonable and supportable, the BIA 2 would simply continue a very flawed fundamental approach by the government to the finances of our nation.