Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in this place. It is a tremendous honour and privilege to represent the constituents of Calgary Rocky Ridge. Many of the constituents of Calgary Rocky Ridge have very strong feelings on the budget.
It is no mystery that our party is opposed to it. We are opposed to the budget implementation act. Notwithstanding the 400-odd amendments that have been introduced and suggested, we will do what we can to try to salvage something from it. We will see how it goes with the amendments. However, I do not think any number of amendments could possibly salvage the budget in total. I am rather down on the budget, as are most of the constituents whom I have spoken to about it.
There are several key aspects of the budget that really still need to be addressed.
When the budget came out, the book was about 400 pages long. The budget implementation act is similar in length. Nowhere in any of these documents will we see the words “balanced budget”. One might ask if that is important or is it an issue. It is important for two reasons.
First, it is prudent management to eventually either have a balanced budget or some kind of a plan toward a balanced budget. All 10 provinces and all three territorial governments are either currently running a balanced budget or have a clearly articulated plan and path toward a balanced budget. The only jurisdiction, the only government in Canada that does not have any type of plan whatsoever for a balanced budget is the federal government. The only finance minister in Canada among all the provincial and territorial governments, including the federal government, who does not have a plan for a balanced budget is the federal finance minister. That is disappointing for its own sake, or even just on the point of policy alone.
Why this is particularly disappointing is that the government ran on a very clear promise. On page 12 of the Liberal platform in the 2015 election, it states:
We will run modest short-term deficits of less than $10 billion in each of the next two fiscal years to fund historic investments in infrastructure and our middle class. After the next two fiscal years, the deficit will decline and our investment plan will return Canada to a balanced budget in 2019.
The Liberals promised no more than $10 billion in deficits. They promised to return to a balanced budget in 2019. This was not something they tucked away in some obscure part of their platform in hopes that nobody would notice. This is something they took to the doors. They said that there would be a modest deficit only to facilitate the infrastructure spending they had planned.
I want to depart from that for one moment and raise how the Liberals' infrastructure plan is going along. Not too long ago the Prime Minister made his first visit to Calgary in quite some time. He came to make a historic spending announcement while he was there in the name of the Liberals' infrastructure plan, $1.53 billion for the green line, an important infrastructure piece for the city of Calgary. It is a critical piece of infrastructure. The only problem is that these funds had been committed and announced by the previous government. The Liberals fly around the country re-announcing projects that were already announced in some cases, like this one, before they were even elected, taking credit for them, and expecting extraordinary credit for the projects. I do not want to digress too far. However, the point is that the budget is a broken election promise.
The Liberals promised no more than $10 billion in deficits and a return to a balanced budget by 2019. The finance minister will not acknowledge in any way that these commitments were made and ignores all questions put to him, including at committee, where he was asked repeatedly when the budget would be balanced. He ignored these questions.
That alone is enough reason to render the budget and its implementation act unworthy of support, but I want to move briefly to the carbon tax. The previous speaker devoted his time to a defence of the carbon tax. Let us even set aside the arguments for and against a tax on carbon; what about evidence-based policy and what about transparency and openness with Canadians?
The government refuses to tell Canadians what the tax will cost. Surely that is a minimum standard to which the government could hold itself, to just simply be honest with Canadians and share what the tax is going to cost as the Liberals compel provinces to adopt it—some of them against their will, some of them in contravention of their own climate change strategies that they have developed through carbon capture, such as the Province of Saskatchewan—without telling Canadians what this tax will cost them and while claiming that it is revenue neutral.
“Do we not know what revenue neutral means?” a member asked in an earlier debate on this. Most Canadians know that “revenue neutral” is code for “it is really going to cost us a whole bunch”, and Liberals will not tell us how much. The first part of revenue neutral that is flagrantly false is that there will be GST on the carbon tax that the federal government is going to collect. That is not revenue neutral. That is a tax on the tax, which the federal government is going to keep.
As for the latitude that the government says it is leaving provinces to decide how they will deal with the carbon tax, that is not revenue neutral to a family. If a family has to pay more tax on all the normal things that families spend money on, such as gasoline to get to work or to take their children to school, it does not matter whether they put gasoline in a car and drive a child to school or whether they pay the bus fee for their child; this tax would apply to all of them.
The tax puts giant holes in municipal governments' budgets, because municipalities have to pay this tax. They have to pay the tax when they fuel their buses so people can take public transit. They still have their cost increased and they still have to pay the carbon tax. Heating homes in a cold country and transportation are things that Canadians spend money on, and they are made more expensive by the carbon tax. I wish the government would please just spare us this talk of revenue neutrality, because it is not washing with Canadians. It really does not make any sense.
Perhaps the Prime Minister came closest to his true feelings when he encouraged Canadians to “make better choices” or change behaviour when people asked how they are going to be able to afford to fill their car with gas so they can go to work.
On page 290 of the budget, the finance minister basically took credit for pipelines that were yet to be built, such as the Trans Mountain expansion. The finance minister acknowledged the differential and the significant discount that Canadians receive for their energy products because of a shortage in pipeline and said that the revenue should improve because new pipe is going to reduce the differential.
Here we are. The pipeline is not any closer to being built. We just spent $4.5 billion on an old pipeline, without even finding out what the cost is going to be to build the new pipeline and deal with all the obstacles that were preventing it from being built by Kinder Morgan. The Liberals' own budget projections rely on new tax revenue that will result from a pipeline that is not even built yet.