Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-74, the budget implementation bill. It is a hulking 556-page piece of legislation that promises nothing at all to Canadians except higher taxes and lower economic opportunities for hard-working Canadians across this great country.
There are many significant flaws in this bill, which are far from the sunny ways promised to Canadians during the last election, in 2015. From a carbon tax to great debt and broken promises, this bill inflicts severe costs upon Canadians without giving them anywhere near the equivalent benefits in return. Day in and day out, Canadians work hard for the money they earn, and they expect the government to support them, rather than work against them, when they pay for things like groceries, electricity, and even heating for their homes.
The Liberals are planning to implement a carbon tax, which will raise the cost of all these essential amenities and, in doing so, make life more expensive and thus more unaffordable for Canadians across the country. Rather than supporting the middle class, as they claim, the Liberals are putting the government before people.
How much more will Canadian families pay in taxes each year as a result of this carbon tax? Like all Canadians, we would like to know, but the government does not want to share what the cost is, because it wants to hide it from Canadians. It is hiding this information, and it is demonstrating that it does not trust Canadians to have a say in what they do with their own money. This is simply not fair to Canadian taxpayers.
The Liberals have shown, through their broken promises and complete lack of interest in reducing the federal deficit, that they never cared much about the taxpayer anyway. While Canadians expect members of Parliament to debate bills on their behalf, members are negatively impacted in their ability to do so when the Liberals simply cover up critical information that is relevant in our conversation here tonight.
There is no question that the carbon tax would hit Canadians hard. The Parliamentary Budget Officer reports that the carbon tax would cause $10 billion to vanish from the Canadian economy by 2022. That means fewer jobs and fewer economic opportunities for people here at home. We are already seeing that. Unfortunately, we do not know how much this carbon tax will cost everyday Canadian families. The Liberals have this information, but they have decided that they know best and will not release it.
These actions severely harm the quality of debate in this chamber on behalf of all Canadians, and therefore one of the key mechanisms by which the government is held to account. These actions do nothing to improve transparency, which, by the way, is what the Liberals ran on during the election cycle in 2015.
The Liberal government has repeatedly demonstrated that when it comes to strategies to combat climate change, the only plan it will accept is a carbon tax. It is a narrow view. No alternatives exist, other than those that punish taxpayers and raise costs for people across this fine country.
Of course, the government cannot even tell us what benefits this carbon tax will bring Canadians. The Ecofiscal Commission estimates that carbon taxes will need to be as high as $200 a tonne or more in order to reach the Liberal government's goal of reducing carbon emissions to 30% of 2005 levels by 2030. As the policy currently stands, the carbon tax will not come anywhere close to reaching that goal. What the carbon tax will do, though, is increase the financial burden on Canadian families from coast to coast. They will have to bear the brunt of this tax through high consumer costs; reduced competitiveness, which we saw today in the aluminum and steel industry; and falling foreign direct investment in Canada's economy. We do not have to talk about that, when the government just recently bought an existing pipeline for $4.5 billion.
These are families whom the Liberal government promised the world to. These are the same families who were told by the Liberal government that their taxes would be lower and that the federal deficit would be erased by 2019. That is only next year. Instead of receiving the results they were promised, these families got something else. They got large government deficits, in fact vague government deficits. We do not even know when the budget will ever be balanced again. They got extra federal debt, a Liberal government with no plans to balance the books at any time in the foreseeable future, and now a carbon tax that would raise their daily living costs and do little to reduce carbon emissions.
Let us look at my province, Saskatchewan. The provincial environment minister estimates that the implementation of the Liberal carbon tax would cost the Saskatchewan economy $4 billion over just five years. No wonder the Government of Saskatchewan is determined to challenge this carbon tax all the way to the Supreme Court. I am proud to stand here and represent the people of Saskatchewan, and in particular Saskatoon—Grasswood, because right now we are the only jurisdiction, provincial or territorial, that has not signed on to this massive Liberal carbon tax.
Communities in Saskatchewan recognize that the carbon tax is nothing but high costs for little or no benefit. There is no Houdini in the province of Saskatchewan. We know the Liberal government is up to no good. It just cannot fool prairie people, and tonight I am proud to say that Saskatchewan is the only jurisdiction in this country that has not signed and will not sign on to the Liberal carbon tax. It is a debt now. We have talked about this debt being passed on to future generations of Canadians, who have no say whatsoever but nonetheless will be born into a situation where they inherit the costs incurred by the Liberals.
During the election of 2015, I was fortunate that my daughter gave birth to my first granddaughter. I was very happy. However, today, when I look at the debt of the current government, which has no plans at all of balancing the budget, I really feel for Avery Thornhill, my two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter. She will be paying for this for the rest of her life. She is only two and a half years old, and we hope that she lives many years, into her eighties or nineties.
Liberals have reckless spending, and they continue to have reckless spending with the carbon tax. Avery Thornhill will never get a chance to have the budget everyone wants, which is an equal budget. Assuming that no external events occur, such as another recession, Canadians will be living with federal deficits at least until 2051. Is that fair to all our grandchildren, when we tell them in 2018 that we have no hope at all of balancing the budget? Maybe it will be balanced by 2051, but as the current government continues to spend recklessly, it could be 2060 or 2070. What a burden we are putting, not only on our own children but on our grandchildren. We are very disappointed.
Canadians deserve many things from the Liberal government. They deserve respect, transparency, fairness, and prosperity, which we all know we have not seen and will not see in the future from the Liberal government.