Mr. Speaker, let me tell the story of a small man named Entrepreneur, carrying a heavy knapsack up a very steep hill. All of a sudden, a big fat man appears next to him and says, “My goodness, that bag on your back looks heavy. My name is Government. Let me take the load off for you.” The big fat man takes the knapsack and puts it on his own back, and the small man thinks how nice it is of him to offer to do that. As they begin walking up the hill, all of a sudden the big man jumps on the back of the little man. Now he is carrying not just the knapsack but the fat man who was carrying the knapsack. The little man looks over his shoulder and asks, “Why is it I have to carry you up the hill?” and Government replies, “It's only fair. After all, I'm carrying your knapsack.”
This is an allegory of whenever government claims to come to the assistance of business. Let me give a few examples where this exact experience has happened. I know members will appreciate this.
In downtown Toronto, Porter Airlines put together a group of investors to extend the runway so it could land more commercial flights right in the heart of the business district, so that business travellers could land in the business district, relieving traffic on the highway between Pearson airport and downtown Toronto. The by-product was that Porter would then buy two billion dollars' worth of planes from Bombardier. The government said, “No, there are some wealthy waterfront owners who don't like the noise, and despite the fact that they chose to live right next to an airport, we're going to protect their multi-million dollar property values at the expense of this multi-billion dollar private sector investment.” Now Bombardier has lost a $2 billion contract to provide an air fleet to a Canadian company, Porter.
What did the government do? It came to the rescue with a taxpayer-funded bailout.
We see the same pattern reproducing itself. We have a government in Ottawa that has blocked the northern gateway pipeline, the energy east pipeline, and has piled on so many regulations that Kinder Morgan, one of the largest diversified pipeline companies in the world, no longer believed it could make a risk-adjusted profit building an expansion of its 60-year-old pipeline between Alberta and the Pacific. This pipeline would otherwise have been a no-brainer. The expansion itself would have taken 600,000 barrels a day from where oil is cheap, in Alberta, to where it is expensive, the international market, allowing businesses to arbitrage the difference between the low western Canada select price and the high international WTI or Brent prices.
It is obviously an economic no-brainer, and clearly, an environmental no-brainer, given that in the exact same route Kinder Morgan has a pipeline that delivers 300,000 barrels per day already, without major incident, and that has been the case since 1953.
The government has prevented that from happening, but we should not worry, the government has come to the rescue. The big fat man called Government comes to the rescue to claim it is bailing out the private sector from problems that government created in the first place. Now, taxpayers have to pay $4.5 billion for a pipeline they already have, of which the book value, according to Kinder Morgan, is about $2.5 billion.
Therefore, government causes the problem and then claims to be the solution to that same problem. The small man, the taxpayer, carrying this big fat man, gets more and more exhausted as he tries to climb higher and higher up this hill. Eventually, the taxpayer becomes completely exhausted and the government walks off with the knapsack and all of its belongings.
Here we are today with a government that has become exponentially more expensive both in direct taxation and indirect costs of regulation. The Liberals are increasing the cost of government at three times the combined rate of inflation and population growth. They have grown spending by almost 25% in less than three budgets. The national debt was growing at twice, now three times, the rate that the Prime Minister promised during the last election. He has piled on regulation after regulation, delay after delay, rejection after rejection for any natural resource project that could liberate billions of dollars of investment in economic growth for our country. However, he says not to worry because he is going to come to the rescue with a bailout for all of those companies his government has so damaged. This is not unique to this socialist government.
Socialist governments across the country at all levels engage in the same practice all the time. We see big, costly, municipal regulations that make it impossible for businesses to build affordable housing for low-income people. Then they say that they need a national government program funded by taxpayers to subsidize more affordable housing, which is the same affordable housing that those municipalities prevent from being constructed in the very first place.
In Ontario, Kathleen Wynne's government, from whom we have been mercilessly liberated by the wise electors of Ontario, has piled on, over a 35-year period, $176 billion in overpayments for electricity provided by unreliable and overpriced suppliers that have made a grand fortune for the investors on Bay Street, while they have doubled the cost of electricity for working-class people and seniors on fixed incomes. That will go down, by the way, as is the single biggest wealth transfer from the low income and working class to the super rich ever exacted by any government in Canadian history. By the way, all of those numbers I just provided were calculated by the Liberal appointed auditor general of that province.
After they take all that money from the working poor and give it to the super rich, they say, “Inequality is out of control. We need a government program to do something about it.” It is like a doctor who administers a poison and then just before the patient falls to the floor, administers an antidote. The patient says, “Why, doctor, did you poison me in the first place?” The doctor says, “So I could save your life”. That is exactly the approach of these Liberals. They do so much damage and then they come to the rescue with other people's money in order to try to repair some of the damage that they have exacted.
The question this inspires is: Why do they not just get out of the way in the first place? Why not, for example, let the private sector build its pipelines in the first place instead of stopping it and then subsidizing it back to life? Why do governments at other levels not stop the red tape that prevents the construction of affordable housing instead of blocking it and then trying to subsidize it into existence later? Instead of taking money from the working poor and giving it to the super rich and then claiming we need a government program to reverse that wealth transfer, why do they not just leave the money in the pockets of those working people in the first place?
The answer is that if they just got out of the way, it would make the politician so much less important. It would be like airbrushing him out of the selfie. We know that the Prime Minister would never have that. It takes humility to rely on the free enterprise system, on self-reliance, on voluntary exchange, and that is the kind of humility we should have in government rather than the egotistical agenda that requires everything pass through the hands of politicians and bureaucrats.
After 2019, we will restore economic freedom, empower Canadians, and improve the future.