moved:
That, given the Prime Minister broke his promise to eliminate the deficit this year and that perpetual and growing deficits lead to massive tax increases, the House call on the Prime Minister to table a plan in Budget 2019 to eliminate the deficit quickly with a written commitment that he will never raise taxes of any kind.
Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise in this new chamber for my first speech here, and may it always remain faithful to the principles and practices of its predecessor. That is our inheritance as parliamentarians and as Canadians.
Speaking of inheritances, the Prime Minister inherited a massive family fortune. He has bragged about it. He has called it a family fortune. Because he has never had to worry about money, he does not worry much about Canadians' money. He believes budgets balance themselves. For people who inherit a family fortune, I suppose they do. He believes one can borrow one's way out of debt. I guess if one has always made other people pay for one's mistakes, that might make sense.
However, for ordinary, everyday Canadians who get up in the morning and earn a living and pay their bills with their own money, none of those things makes sense at all. The problem with this mindset is not just that it dances riddles in the Prime Minister's brain, but that it plays out in real consequences for Canadians, consequences they feel in their everyday lives. Canadians are paying for his mistakes.
Political life has only grown the Prime Minister's fortune. He forces taxpayers to fund his nannies while working Canadians pay for their own child care expenses. He was found guilty of breaking ethics laws by accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in free vacations from someone seeking a grant from his government. He accepted thousands of dollars in speaking fees from charities and school boards while he was being paid to work here in the House of Commons. At that time, he had the third worst attendance record of any of the then 308 members of Parliament. He even forced Canadian taxpayers to pay the expense for him to clown around India with a terrorist and a celebrity chef in tow, until that great country laughed him out of town.
Canadians work hard and they pinch their pennies, so they laugh when the Prime Minister says that the budget will balance itself. Many of them, though, believed him when he put his hand on his heart and promised that the budget would be balanced this year. He looked them straight in the eye and said there would be three modest deficits followed by a balanced budget this year.
However, now we know that not only did this Prime Minister inherit a fortune, but he is costing Canadians a fortune. The debt is growing to four times as much as he said. Far from being balanced this year, the budget will not be balanced, according to Finance Canada, until the year 2040. We know what this means, and that is the purpose of this debate.
We know that this Prime Minister's out-of-control and growing deficit today will lead, if he is re-elected, to higher taxes tomorrow. Before we get into the case to prove that reality, let us just point out that not everybody is doing worse.
The wealthiest Canadians are doing much better. The Prime Minister and people like him who have family fortunes, such as the trust fund finance minister, are in the class of the one per cent. According to the CRA, the wealthiest one per cent is actually paying $4.6 billion less in income taxes than it was in the final year of the previous Conservative government. This, of course, runs contrary to the Prime Minister's promise, but it is the factual reality, which his own department of tax collection has publicly reported, and which has been printed in the Globe and Mail.
Unfortunately, for everyone else, those people without a family fortune, life is getting more expensive. Let us just recap why it is getting more expensive. When it becomes costly, the government makes life more costly. Deficits drive up interest rates and inflation in the present, and they drive up taxes in the future. That is why Canadians are consistently telling us they cannot make ends meet.
Half of Canadians now say they are $200 away from insolvency, not able to pay their monthly bills. I have an unfortunate message, a warning, for all Canadians. Yes, taxes have gone up under the present Prime Minister, but they ain't seen nothing yet, and let me give the evidence for that claim.
First, the Prime Minister broke his promise and raised taxes once before. The average middle-class family is paying $800 more in taxes than when he took office. This is because he took away the children's fitness tax credit, the transit tax credit, the textbook tax credit from students and the education tax credit from those same students. That is in addition to the increases in payroll taxes that take effect this year and the carbon tax that takes effect on April 1.
The Prime Minister took in all of the extra revenue from these taxes, and one would think that would have helped the budgetary balance, but instead the $20-billion windfall that resulted from higher taxes and a booming world economy has vanished, because the Prime Minister blew every penny.
That brings us to the second point. The Prime Minister not only raised taxes, but he got caught trying to raise others. He attempted to impose a 73% tax on small business investment. He attempted to impose new tax penalties on family businesses that transfer the company or the farm from father to son or mother to daughter. He tried to tax health and dental benefits.
He even tried to put in a new tax on what are called employee discounts, like when a waitress has a chicken salad sandwich on her 10-minute break at one o'clock in the morning. Her employer was going to have to put that on her T4 slip and force her to pay income tax on it at the end of the year. Thank God we caught the Prime Minister and forced him to put that plan on ice.
He also attempted to take away the disability tax credit from diabetics. These tax hikes will all be back if he is re-elected, when he will no longer need voters but will still need their money.
Then we have the carbon tax cover-up. It started with the blacking out of documents that I requested in an ATIP, asking for the real cost to average families of the Liberal carbon tax. The Liberals claim that this tax makes people better off. If that were true, surely they would be determined to release every single government document they have to prove it. Instead, there are dozens of pages covered, ironically, with black ink, which is of course a carbon-based product itself. They have not revealed how much carbon went into that ink either, so that is another part of this cover-up. That is only the first part of the costs they refused to reveal.
The second part is that the documents they released that were not blacked out indicated that they will not be able to meet their climate change goals with a $50-a-tonne carbon tax. They now admit that it will require a $300 carbon tax. That is six times higher than they admit and 15 times higher than the tax is expected to be this year. Rather than, as the government claims, costing Ontario families about $600, when the carbon tax is implemented it will cost them over $3,000. Rather than costing the average Saskatchewan family about $900, it will cost that same family well over $5,000.
Again, that is based on documents the government released, and the numbers are calculated based on the government's own figures. These are not the opposition's calculations; they come directly out of the government's documents. In reality, if Canadians re-elect the present Prime Minister, they will pay carbon taxes in excess of $3,000 per year in Ontario and $5,000 a year in Saskatchewan.
The Prime Minister will tell Canadians not to worry because he will send them a rebate for $150 a year. Big deal. Trading $3,000 for $150 might make sense if one has inherited a family fortune, but for the folks who pinch their pennies in order to get by, that is a financial disaster. For families who are $200 away from failing to pay their monthly bills, that is a mathematical impossibility. They recognize that they are already paying for the Prime Minister's mistakes, and they cannot afford to pay a fortune more.
The next proof point that the government will impose massive tax increases if the Prime Minister is re-elected is the deficit. The Prime Minister promised we would have a balanced budget. He broke that promise. He broke his promise on deficits; he will break his promise on taxes. It is a mathematical fact that runaway and growing, permanent deficits must eventually lead to tax increases. The only way to avoid that is to set in place a plan, starting this year, to phase out that deficit over a reasonable time frame so that we can avoid the higher taxes that the Prime Minister is setting Canadians up to pay.
This is an unavoidable fact. We have seen it before. Back in the eighties and nineties, the deficit grew and grew until the interest was consuming one out of every three dollars that Canadians spent on their federal taxes. Now we see the same trend. The deficit is growing, and so is the debt interest. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, by the year 2023, only four years from now, we will be spending $40 billion a year on debt interest. That is an increase of two-thirds from last year. We will be spending more on debt interest than the government currently spends on health transfers. In other words, that means money for bankers and bondholders rather than for doctors and nurses.
Of course, when that happens, the Prime Minister will come back here and say that circumstances have changed and he can no longer keep his promises, and that yes, he denied and denied during the 2019 election that he was going to raise taxes, just as he had denied and denied that he would run long-term deficits in the election before, but that unfortunately he is going to have to make Canadians pay more. We can almost imagine him giving the speech now, a tear rolling down his cheek, blaming everyone but himself: “It is the world's fault. It is Stephen Harper's fault. It is John A. Macdonald's fault. It is Wilfrid Laurier's fault.” He could go further back into history, I am sure. There is no one who is more skilled at externalizing blame for his own failures than the Prime Minister. We can count on him to do it again in the future. If—God forbid—he is re-elected, he will impose massive taxes.
It is a common characteristic of those who have never had to pay for their own mistakes. If people inherit a family fortune, they just pass on their mistakes to others and let them pay for it. That is how he has lived his life and that is how he has governed the country. However, Canadians can no longer afford to pay for his mistakes.
That brings us to the fifth and final proof point: because he inherited a fortune, he costs one. He costs Canadians a fortune.
Most people understand the basic principle of scarcity. When they are raising their kids, they will tell them they can do skiing in the winter or hockey, but they cannot do both, or they can have a great vacation at the cottage or at Disneyland, but they cannot do both. Most people who go out and buy groceries are going to make sure they get the best price for those groceries so that their dollar goes as far as possible. Someone who inherits a family fortune does not have any appreciation for that sense of scarcity, because there is always someone else's money to spend. It is always “yes” and “get me the most expensive one you can find”. That is exactly how he has run the government.
Do members know that the Government of Canada is 25% more expensive today than when the Prime Minister took office? Does anybody out there in the real world believe they are getting 25% better services or products from the Government of Canada? I cannot find a constituent who can identify a 25% increase in the benefit.
If a grocery store charges 25% more than the competition but says to just trust it because it is worth the money, yet the product is exactly the same as before or worse than before, then really the grocery store is asking the consumer to pay for the brand name. Does that not remind us of someone? Even though it is way more expensive, worse in quality, costs more and does less, we would pay 25% more for the brand name.