Mr. Speaker, I am always happy to take the floor, particularly in this brand new West Block Commons. To start, I want to echo the comments of many of my colleagues and our leader in thanking all the people who have been part of this historic move and the renovation of this amazing space. Our Parliament is in session when Canadians send their representatives and we meet to debate the issues of the day, with you, Mr. Speaker, moderating the debate, and with the mace.
While the room may change, the institution is core to our country, and the success we have had as one of the leading countries of the world is rooted in our democracy. I will speak about that in depth, because there has actually been an erosion in responsible government under the current government. In fact, when it comes to debt, deficit and taxation, the Liberals are deviating from the historic responsible-government model that Canada's parliamentary democracy enjoys.
I will get to that later, but the member for Carleton brought a good motion today, because the government has no plan. There is no plan to balance the budget and no plan to withhold more and future tax increases on top of the ones that are already in place, and there have been broken promises by the Liberal government with respect to its core economic agenda. Therefore, this opposition day motion raises this as an important national issue, and the House is calling upon the government to do a simple thing: table a plan to get back to balance, and do it with a pledge of no future tax increases.
Why is that plan a good one, and why should it be simple? The Harper government did that amid the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, when we were the only country of stability within the G7 and we had a balanced budget that was maintained while we lowered taxes on families, seniors and employers. That was tough to do, particularly when there was global stagnation. We had positive growth, we had a balanced budget, and we had lower taxes. We had to have a plan to do that.
Before I speak about the plan, let us talk about the promise, because Canadians were misled by the Prime Minister. I have said a few times in the House that what should scare Canadians is that midway through an election, the current Prime Minister, then the third party leader, changed his core economic plan in the middle of the election to win votes away from the NDP. He was willing to throw out the Liberals' economic plan, the most important thing a government does, in order to curry votes.
At the beginning of the election, the Liberals were the party of Paul Martin, of balanced budgets. They quoted David Dodge and all these things about prudent and sound economic management. Midway through, the Liberals lied to Canadians. They said we were in a recession, which was not true, so they were going to run modest deficits, which we know is not true, in order to stimulate the economy with infrastructure spending. That, as the Parliamentary Budget Officer has shown, is not true either.
Therefore, the Liberals lied to Canadians about the crisis, that we were in a recession, and they suggested they were going to have short-term, modest deficits based on infrastructure to get the economy moving. All of that has proven to be untrue.
We recall the Liberals' election pledge to Canadians. We have seen it online. We just have to scroll to see the Prime Minister's comments from various speeches and debates. He said the Liberal government would run modest deficits, never larger than $10 billion, and that it would be back into balance by 2019. All of that, again, was false. Despite having the best economic times in 25 years because of a booming U.S. economy, we have seen deficits that have been double or more what he promised. Rather than balancing the budget this year, in 2019, the Prime Minister and his finance minister refuse to even give a future date for balance.
We have seen that money has not gone out to infrastructure in the GTA, in Whitby, in Pickering or in Brampton. The Liberals are waiting. There has actually been a slowdown, and when it comes to spending on affordable housing and other forms of social infrastructure, they have back-end loaded all the funding announcements. Therefore, they announce big numbers but the money will not flow until the mid-2020s.
Why have we moved this motion today? We want the government to stop its shell game on the economy and stop relying on Canadian families, seniors and small businesses as the people it can squeeze and squeeze again for its overspending.
How can I say that? It is because this current government, by its third budget, had increased spending by over 20%. It increased spending across the board, including spending for the hiring of personnel, which is the largest expense for most departments. There is a 20% increase in spending by the government. There are increased revenues, but revenue forecasts are out by $5 billion and $10 billion. The government is bringing in more money because the economy has been doing well, but it is spending even more than it is bringing in. It has increased spending by the federal government by 20%, and most Canadians families could not tell us about any positive development from that. As we see more growth in the office towers in Ottawa, we hear reports in the last week of a majority of Canadians being $200 away from bankruptcy, or almost a majority, I believe.
These are challenging times. In manufacturing in Ontario, the Oshawa area had the GM announcement. Our resource sector in western Canada, for years now, has been feeling it. The Prime Minister and the finance minister, who live in gilded cages, do not understand the needs of families, seniors and small businesses in my area in Durham. It is why they say there is no problem and that we do not need to ever balance the budget, because in their world budgets do balance themselves. They hire someone to do that. They hire someone to manage the affairs of their trusts or their family fortune, as the Prime Minister puts it. They need to do a reality check with Canadians. Life is not 20% better from the government's 20% overspending. Canadians are being squeezed, and we all know that the deficits of today, be they $18 billion or $28 billion, which are the numbers we have had in the last few years, are the higher taxes of tomorrow. My daughter, who is 12 now, will be in university before the current government can balance the budget at the current rate. She can guarantee herself that she will have to pay higher taxes then because of the Liberals' mismanagement now.
The deficit and the spending are out of control. In the last budget, the Liberals used the word “investment” more than 450 times in the budget document. Do members know what “investment” is in Liberal language? It is spending. They can frame it in more positive-sounding language, but it just shows reckless and wanton spending, because they always feel they can squeeze Canadians. They can squeeze farmers in terms of transitioning the family farm in succession planning. They can squeeze small businesses, physicians and other people who have retained earnings to try to make sure they can plan for the uncertainties in life, such as unemployment, maternity leave and retirement. The government is even talking about re-auctioning wireless spectrum, which is essentially expropriating resources so that it can squeeze more money out of it.
The Liberals actually have Crown agencies right now that have been tasked with trying to raise more revenue. They have both a spending and a revenue problem. They have raised taxes on people and small businesses. They are bringing in a nationalized carbon tax. They brought in a payroll tax on small businesses. They cut tax-free savings accounts, which hurt seniors in particular. They have raised new taxes on ride-sharing and on Saturday night, as they say, because they have raised taxes on alcohol and the Uber ride home. The Liberals love the cannabis change, because they can tax that too.
Do members know what the Liberals tried to do, contrary to representative government? They tried to put an escalator clause on the alcohol tax raises, meaning they were not even going to come back to the legislature before they raised taxes yet again.
Dozens of tax increases on Canadians and reckless spending: these are the reasons we are asking the Prime Minister today for a plan to get back to balance and to lower taxes.
