Madam Speaker, the government did go out and buy a 65-year-old pipeline for $4.5 billion. No one could have conceived of that.
There is something interesting missing in those 850-odd pages of the budget. It is the money needed to build this new pipeline the Prime Minister keeps talking about. The Liberals actually have a line for the Trans Mountain pipeline, and in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021, the figure they have associated with building that new pipeline is zero dollars. That is curious, because the Prime Minister keeps saying that he is going to build this pipeline, yet he has accounted zero dollars to do it. Besides the question of whether it is a good idea to nationalize parts of the oil industry, it is more than curious.
I am looking at the finance minister's own numbers. At the end of last week, the finance minister said that it was the strongest wage growth in years, and he claimed to have facts in hand that showed that wage growth has increased dramatically. However, according to his own departmental statistics, from September 2015 to September of 2018, inflation was 5.2% and wages grew by 4.9%. Wage growth has not even kept pace with inflation. It seems pretty condemning of the finance minister's record that this is true and that he misrepresents the facts to Canadians.
I wonder if my friend can comment.