Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Edmonton West.
Here we are, in the final moments of debate, the penultimate opportunity to speak to the 2018-19 main estimates. I am delighted to have this opportunity. For the benefit of folks looking in from home, the main estimates are supposed to list and outline the resources required by individual departments and agencies for the upcoming fiscal year, in order to deliver the programs for which they are responsible. The main estimates are supposed to be allotments of dollars and cents, many dollars and cents, aligned with specific spending plans, laid out by the government in the budget for the fiscal year.
As we know, budget 2018 was not an economic document. It was a virtue signalling, social engineering, shamelessly pandering, ideologically preoccupied pitch to what one respected national commentator described as “every conceivable Liberal client group and policy cult”.
This year, in budget 2018 the government told Canadians that total government revenues this year, taxes primarily, would amount to about $324 billion. Total expenditures by the government and its agencies and departments would be about $339 billion, leaving the budget in a deficit of more than $18 billion. Let us remember, this major deficit is much more than the modest deficits promised by the Liberals, and that their promise of a balanced budget by next year will also be broken, along with so many of their original 2015 campaign promises.
Getting back to the main estimates and how they are supposed to work, the various spending authorities are called “votes” with the amounts to be included in future appropriation bills that Parliament will be asked to approve to enable the government to proceed with its spending plans. That is the way it is supposed to work.
Members may recall the days when finance ministers explained in detail the planned expenditures to Parliament and to Canadians. Not here, there are scores of unknown and undetailed spending elements in the main estimates for 2018-19. That is why so many of my colleagues have shared with the House and Canadians their concern that the Liberals are changing the rules to suit their own suspect agenda.
Is “suspect” too extreme a characterization? I do not think so. After hearing so many opposition speakers, I am sure the Speaker shares our concerns regarding the unacceptable way the Liberals are trying to hide their spending intentions from Canadians. For example, we have the oft-referenced $7.4-billion example. Vote 40, a $7.4-billion vote, is either an attempt to hide next year's election year goodies funding, like the many million dollars dumped into the Quebec riding facing a by-election in just a very days, or it was a very large contingency fund to cover the President of the Treasury Board's unidentified spending priorities, as set by the direction of the Prime Minister and cabinet to avoid parliamentary oversight.
This $7.4 billion has been quite properly characterized by our shadow finance minister, the member for Carleton, as nothing more than a Liberal election-year slush fund. At committee earlier this month, departments that had received major allotments were unable to give meaningful answers about millions of dollars they were to receive or how the spending of those millions will be reported, if ever at all.
Instead, in something of a puppet show, Treasury Board officials stepped in to offer their answers for the department officials who could not. When it came time at that meeting to ask questions about how the mysterious $7.4 billion apparent slush fund would be spent, the Liberal members of committee walked out. Their abandonment of committee killed quorum, leaving those questions unanswered, as they are still unanswered today.
Among the scores of unanswered questions is another glaring question, which was debated in the House earlier today. That question involves the Liberal refusal to tell Canadians just how much the carbon tax obligations they have downloaded on the provinces to collect will cost the average Canadian family.
The Liberals know the answer. They will not tell us, and they will not tell Canadians. They have provided a document that quite clearly focuses on the potential impact of a carbon price on household consumption expenditures, but when the document comes to key findings, there is a blackout. Most segments of the rest of the document are redacted, hidden behind solid ink black blocks.
Members will recall that under our previous Conservative government, Canada worked to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by regulation. Even though Canada generates less than 2%, now far less than 2%, of the world's annual emissions, we acknowledged that we would work with the provinces to carefully reduce emissions while at the same time ensuring that we protected the economy, even as we protected the environment, lines that have since been taken by the Liberal minister and reiterated, by rote, in question period almost every day. As a result, our Conservative government was the first in history to achieve tangible, significant reductions of greenhouse gases.
We started with the transportation sector, the largest-emitting sector, and we created, in partnership with the United States, tailpipe regulations, which are reducing car and light-truck emissions and will, by 2025, reduce those emissions by 50%, and which will consume 50% less fuel. We set new regulations for heavy-duty trucks and buses that are seeing emissions from these vehicles, by this year, reduced by up to 23%, which means a saving of up to $8,000 a year for a semi-truck operator driving a newly purchased 2018 model vehicle.
We set marine emission guidelines, began work with the aviation and rail sectors, and then moved on to the next-largest emission sector: coal-fired electricity generating plants. We set emission-reduction regulations, and our former Conservative government imposed a ban on the construction of any new coal-fired units, the first government in the world to implement such a ban.
In every one of those emission-reducing regulations, scientists and economists at Environment Canada conducted a cost-benefit study, and in every one of those situations, we were able to show that the benefits of the regulations outweighed the costs. The regulated sectors and the provinces and the consumers knew what careful, reasonable regulation would cost. That is why we are so concerned by the Liberals' refusal to come clean on the estimated cost to the average Canadian family of their carbon tax.
I would like to end with just a couple of statements by past and present parliamentary budget officers. Former PBO, Kevin Page, said, of the unaccounted billions in the main estimates, “Financial control and ministerial accountability are being undermined.” He said that of the current government and the main estimates and the budget. Mr. Page said, “This is a new low for our appropriation system.”
The current PBO said, “virtually none of the money requested in the new Budget Implementation vote has undergone scrutiny through the standard Treasury Board Submission process.” In effect, the current Parliamentary Budget Officer is saying that the government is getting the money through its majority, without proper scrutiny and accountability to this elected House.
Therefore, we in the official opposition will, in the coming many hours, stand so many times, proudly, to oppose the Liberals' unexplained, undocumented, and unaccounted removal of billions of dollars from the national treasury, to be spent in ways that can only be described as highly suspect in the coming election year.