Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Sturgeon River—Parkland.
Today, I have the privilege of talking about the main estimates. To some, this might sound rather boring; to others, they might not even know what the estimates are; and still to others, they know exactly what they are and get really excited about it.
What exactly are the estimates? Essentially, it is a financial plan put out by the government. It shows its priorities for the next year. Specifically, it casts a vision, but the vision is cast in numbers, really big numbers, lots of spending. As the opposition, it is our responsibility to look through these numbers and decide whether the government's spending is actually in the best interest of Canadians. Then we come before this place and we are able to put forward arguments with regard to whether those numbers are in fact in the best interest of Canadians.
Why should Canadians care? Canadians should care because governments do not have their own money. Governments spend Canadians' money. It is called “taxes”. At the end of the day, when we are talking about the estimates, talking about spending, and looking at these massive numbers, we are talking about the money Canadians have worked really hard for.
The Liberal government is spending a lot of it, a ton of money. It is money it does not have, a good portion of it anyway, so it is fair to say that when it is spending this money it is actually driving us further into deficit as a country. Now, there are only two ways a country can make money. One, it can develop the natural resources it has at its disposal. For example, building a pipeline and getting a commodity to market would produce money. The other way that a country can produce money is by taxing people directly through income tax, a gasoline tax, or through other sorts of taxation, a carbon tax, perhaps. We will get to that in just a moment.
While a Conservative government believes in giving priority to the development of natural resources, expanding trade, and developing international relationships, the Liberal government has actually chosen to increase taxation and incur a giant deficit while not fostering relationships with other countries, not making sure our commodities are able to get to market, nor ensuring we are attracting investors to Canada. The problem with this way of governing is that it makes life incredibly expensive for everyday Canadians.
This budget, and therefore the estimates, could have been great. It could have cast a really great forecast across the country, a really great vision for our country. We had a lot of potential going for us. When the Liberals came into power, they had a world economy thriving all around them. Interests rates were low. The Canadian dollar was down, which facilitated trade, and entrepreneurs were creating jobs and were invested in our country, at least they were until recently. Now they have decided to pick up and go because there is a carbon tax being implemented. Those things were positive and created potential for us as a country to do incredible things.
With that, a responsible government would take advantage of this economic stature and take the additional money it could generate during this time and put it aside for when the country falls upon hard economic times and it is needed. Instead, the government is choosing to spend an additional $18 billion it does not have, which means it is an $18-billion deficit. There is absolutely no requirement to do this; the government is just doing it.
I have looked through the estimates and the budget, and I have tried to find what is so great about this that the government needed the extra $18 billion. I just cannot find it. The government will try to tell us it needs it in part, a significant part it says, for infrastructure, because infrastructure helps build our economy, helps invest in our nation, and make it a viable place for further investment from other businessmen and women.
The problem with this is that when we look at the numbers in the estimates, what we see is that infrastructure spending has been cut by $2.1 billion here and $35 billion has been given to a foreign investment bank, namely China. We are investing in its infrastructure, but we are not investing in Canada's infrastructure. How will this help Canadians? It will not.
Let us look at some other things. The government is creating a $7-billion slush fund without telling us where that money is going. There is no accountability and no transparency.
The government is also taking $4.5 billion and putting it toward a pipeline. It did not need to put it toward this pipeline. The pipeline was going to go forward based on private money. However, the government ragged the puck. It put incredible regulatory measures in place. It withheld its support from Kinder Morgan, and at the end of the day, it had to swoop in and buy this pipeline. Members might be thinking that $4.5 billion does not seem like that much and is a pretty good deal. It is not, because this pipeline is only worth about $2 billion. Therefore, we are paying $4.5 billion for a pipeline that is worth $2 billion, and we did not even need to spend a dime on it because it would have been built based on private money from Kinder Morgan.
In addition to that, we could talk about the veterans. The Prime Minister was recently at a town hall where he was asked why he was not investing more money into veterans. He had the audacity to say to these wounded veterans that we just do not have the money right now. The government has $7 billion for a slush fund, $35 billion for China, $4.5 billion for a pipeline that the government did not need to purchase because it was going to go into the ground if the government would have just let it, yet it does not have money for veterans.
At a time when the government should be focused on making life more affordable for Canadians by getting out of the way, it is focusing on implementing more regulations and slamming Canadians with more taxes. The current Prime Minister is failing Canadian families over and over again.
Recently, there was an Ipsos Reid poll that came out in December. It said that about half of Canadian families are within $200 a month of not being able to pay their household bills. That is a very slim margin. If their expenses go up by $200, they will no longer be able to pay their bills. That is a big deal. It is especially a big deal when we have a federal government in place that is trying to implement a carbon tax, which will definitely boost the household debt load.
Let us talk about that carbon tax. We are not talking about a little tax. We are talking about a big tax. We are talking about a tax on everything. We are talking about a tax that is going to be imposed on home heating, fuel, and electricity. Anything that requires fossil fuels in order to get it to market or in its production will be taxed. We are talking about clothing, shoes, food, and camping equipment. All of that will have a tax applied to it. Not only that, but the GST will also have a tax applied to it.
Albertans have been paying a carbon tax since January 1, 2017. I thought that I would do a little survey with those in my riding and ask them if the carbon tax has changed their behaviour, because that is the theory, that it will somehow change people's consumption patterns. I asked a few questions in this survey. I asked if people did not need to heat their homes in winter, if they no longer needed to drive to work on a consistent basis, if they stopped buying groceries, if they no longer required corrective lenses in order to see, if their children no longer needed to be driven to sports practices, if they started to walk their household garbage and recycling to their respective places instead of using curbside pickup, and if they started their own cotton farm and sewed their own clothes. I even asked my farmers if they reverted to using a plow. I did not get a single positive response. We are shocked. We would expect the carbon tax to change these behaviours. However, it has not. It is an absolute joke. It is simply a tax that the current government is imposing on every single Canadian. It will do nothing to reduce greenhouse gases, as proven by B.C., and it will do nothing to change our behaviours and our consumption patterns.
We rely on fossil fuels to live everyday life. That needs to be acknowledged in this place as a fact. To pretend that it is not so is absolutely ignorant of the government. Therefore, with regard to this carbon tax, I would call upon the government to back off and put measures in place that are supportive of Canadian families instead of harmful. A government's responsibility is to look out for the well-being of its citizens, to provide an environment where they can prosper, where their dreams can be made into reality, where they can thrive. I call upon the government to create that environment, because that is the Canada that every single Canadian from coast to coast deserves.