Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be restarting the debate with the time I have left. After the interesting and lively question period we had, I want to return to a few points I made yesterday on a different bill, because it speaks to the substance of the budget in the end.
A mantra the government has used repeatedly in the House, and it used it again in question period, is that “the environment and the economy go together.” Those were the exact words used by the Minister of Environment.
In the budget book, my hope would have been to have actually seen an attempt to get a balance between the environment and the economy, but the Liberals failed to do so. We can see that in the repeated deficits they have created year after year. They are structural and they are occurring at a time when we are seeing growth in the economy.
It is not stellar growth. In fact, we are not the leading economy in the G7. We are a middling country in the G7. There is a lot of growth the government has hurt. The PBO reported that we are losing up to 0.4%, perhaps 0.5% in GDP growth. This is a penalty on Canadians. It is a penalty on middle-class families.
I asked the Parliamentary Budget Office staff at a committee if they had ever seen the Government of Canada impose a policy decision that resulted in the loss of a half a percentage of GDP growth. For a moment they were stunned and silent, and actually said “no”. They have not gotten back to the committee since then with an example of the Canadian government purposely reducing economic growth through its own policy decision.
I talked earlier about how the first quarter of the year is being reported as one of the slowest in two years in terms of growth, partly because of the mortgage decisions. Nineteen to 20 mortgage decisions have been taken by the Government of Canada over the past two years that have hurt the ability of middle-class Canadians, and in fact all Canadians, to purchase their first homes, move down or move up the housing ladder, and invest in themselves for the future. There was the stress test. We know the B20 rule, introduced January 1, has hurt Canadians.
I tried to raise this matter at the finance committee yesterday as material to the budget, because indeed the budget outlook is dependent on ensuring strong economic growth. Yesterday, when I raised the matter, it was voted down by every single Liberal member on the committee, without a single word spoken as to an explanation. The members simply voted it down. They did not want to hear it, and why would they want to when the news is all bad?
I used the Yiddish proverb before that “money is round and it rolls away from you”. It is rolling away from the Government of Canada. These runaway deficits are ensuring that future generations of Canadians will have to pay for this uncontrolled spending that the Government of Canada has pursued, and for very little purpose. There is no actual end goal to any of this. There is no end purpose to these three budget bills that they have provided to us so far, and the implementation of them. We do not know when the budget will be balanced. We know when they talk about the environment and the economy going hand in hand what they actually mean is one hand is in the pocket of the taxpayer fishing out carbon taxes and the other hand is in the pocket of Canadians fishing out higher small business taxes and higher payroll taxes.
I will mention that the Liberals did abandon a great deal of the disastrous small business tax they were going to try to impose back in the fall, but I still have constituents today who will be severely and deeply affected by these new small business tax plans.
These are not rich Canadians. These are people who in their line of business are not earning anywhere near the highest marginal effective tax rate. They are simply in a business that is proving to be profitable, and each spouse wants to take a little out of the business to pay themselves. The taxes being proposed in the budget and the changes to the small business taxation being proposed to dividend schemes and passive income in this budget will hurt those small business owners in my riding. It is a new set of people who are going to be hurt by them, not the same individuals who stood up and vociferously opposed the government in the fall for the tax changes it proposed.
I will be opposing the budget bill. It is another failure. We have three consecutive failed budget bills that will not achieve any of the goals of balancing the environment and the economy.