Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak in favour of the motion that has been brought forward by the official opposition. It demands that the Liberal government answer a very simple question. It is a question that has been asked repeatedly by Canadians for the last three years now. The question is this: In what year will the budget be balanced? It is as simple as that.
We call upon the Liberal government to finally be up front with Canadians and tell us in this week's fall economic statement in what year the budget will be balanced. This motion is reasonable. It is fair and it is certainly straightforward. The Liberal government should have no trouble telling Canadians from coast to coast to coast when it will balance the budget.
The Liberals clearly had no trouble telling Canadians during the 2015 election that they would balance the budget by 2019. That is just a year away, I should add. Why is it that as soon as they get into government, after piling on billions and billions of debt through reckless spending they suddenly seem to struggle with this simple question? Why is it that the Liberal government's most extensive track record is its ever-growing list of broken promises?
When the Liberals fail to tell Canadians time and time again when the budget will be balanced, they are not only failing to be accountable to the current generation of Canadians, they are failing to be accountable to future generations as well. The Liberal debt of today will become the higher taxes of tomorrow. These are the taxes which are heaped onto the shoulders of our children and our grandchildren. They did not ask to be overburdened with this Liberal debt. They did not ask to be the ones who will be stuck with the terrible task of paying for the deficits of today.
Does the Liberal government have any plans at all to lessen the burden which it continues to create for these future generations? Has it at least committed to reduce the rate at which it adds to the federal debt? Unfortunately for our children and our grandchildren, the answer is no. In fact, the Liberal government has just made the situation worse by increasing its reckless spending with each passing year.
The one thing that the Liberal government really excels at is its ability to keep digging itself into a hole which keeps getting deeper, deeper and deeper. The unfortunate thing is that the current generation and future generations of Canadians will be the ones who will bear the consequences of the future and the failure.
The irresponsibility of the Liberal government has significant costs for all Canadians. The size of the deficit in this year alone is nearly $20 billion, a figure which is three times larger than what the Liberals promised it would be. The Liberal government has added a remarkable $60 billion in debt. This is not what the Liberals promised to Canadians.
Last year alone the Liberal government spent $23 billion just to service the national debt, $23 billion. This is not what the Liberals promised to Canadians. Interest on the national debt now is expected to grow by two-thirds to $37 billion a year, which is almost as much as we spend on the entire health care transfers to provinces and territories. This is not what the Liberals promised to Canadians.
How can the Liberal government claim it stands for sunny ways, that it believes in supporting the middle class and that it supports the development of economic opportunity for all Canadians when it actively pursues a policy of fiscal mismanagement which will see more and more Canadian tax dollars going towards interest payments on the national debt? Compare it to the amount which is actually spent on health care transfers.
Canadians expect that their hard-earned tax dollars will go toward funding programs and services that benefit all Canadians. Unfortunately, reckless Liberal spending will make sure that increasingly large portions of those tax dollars simply go into the pockets of bankers and bond holders who own the interest on this ever-growing Liberal debt.
Perhaps what is most shocking about the debt of the Liberal government is it was completely avoidable. When we look back at 2015, the Liberals did not face a dire economic situation when they came into government just three years ago. In fact, the Liberals inherited a great fortune, which any government would dream of.
The Prime Minister inherited a balanced budget, which was left behind by our former Conservative government. He had the benefit of thriving U.S. and global economies, which had recovered from the worst of the 2008 recession. He could take advantage of booming housing markets in Toronto and Vancouver. He had the benefit of record low interest rates, never seen before in our lifetime. All of these added factors gave the Prime Minister a windfall of $20 billion in additional revenue alone last year. However, despite all this great fortune, the Prime Minister still somehow managed to spend it all in a matter of mere months, leaving all Canadians with almost absolutely nothing to show for it.
Instead of sunny ways and real change, the Prime Minister has left Canadians with a growing mountain of billions of dollars of debt, which is not going to be erased for many years to come. Instead of a budget which balances itself, like the Prime Minister actually promised in 2015, Finance Canada tells us that Canadians will now face at least 25 more years of deficit at the rate that the Liberal government engages in reckless spending.
Canadians are already facing the costs of higher interest, record household debt, and instead of helping to ease the burden faced by Canadians, the Liberal government is hurting Canadians by saddling them with the prospect of more massive tax increases just to fund the Prime Minister's reckless and inefficient spending habits.
Canadians deserve a government that actually works for them rather than against them. Sadly, the Liberal government only continues to disrespect hard-working taxpayers by making life more expensive for Canadians across this great country.
Because the Prime Minister never had to worry about money, he does not think or even worry much about Canadians when he carelessly spends it. We have seen that. He did not worry when he spent over $1.66 million on that failed trip to India, which only led to an international diplomatic debacle. He did not worry when he spent over $8 million, just a year ago, on a temporary ice hockey rink on the lawn of Parliament Hill. He certainly did not worry when he paid $4.5 billion of taxpayers' money to Kinder Morgan as a result of his failure to get the Trans Mountain expansion pipeline built.
How will the Liberals' newly purchased pipeline factor into this year's budget? We still do not know. It cost $4.5 billion. What is the Liberals' plan to sell the Trans Mountain pipeline? The Liberals still have absolutely no meaningful plans whatsoever to get this pipeline built.
This past May I spoke to the Liberal government's budget implementation bill. I asked the Liberal government whether it was fair to members of future generations of Canadians, like my granddaughter, Avery Thornhill, when we tell them that in 2018, the government has no hope at all of balancing the budget. The Liberals have repeatedly failed to give Canadians an answer to this question. That is why Conservatives are calling on the government today to announce in its fall economic update two days from now in what year the budget will finally be balanced.
Canadians deserve respect, and they deserve to know when the budget will be balanced by the current government.