Yes. Pick up the phone. For anybody who has ever called the Prime Minister's switchboard, it is an interesting experience. People can just call up and ask for anyone in the world they want, and they are on hold for about 30 seconds and then they have them. It is a pretty impressive system of communication.
Somehow it did not work in the Prime Minister's office for the month following this extraordinary interaction. The clerk just could not get hold of the Prime Minister. One day he was surfing in Tofino and the next day he was doing something else. It was just absolutely impossible for the clerk to relay this extraordinary conversation about an issue that was extremely pressing. That is what we are expected to believe.
That is an example of a contradiction on which we need clarity. I am standing and speaking at great length, much to the dismay and torment of my Liberal colleagues across the way. I am here to say that I will put an end to this merciless address, as long as they agree that all the witnesses, all of the players who interfered with the former attorney general, will come before a parliamentary committee and answer for their actions so that we can get to the bottom of this scandal.
At any moment, I would welcome the government House leader or the deputy House leader rising to announce that the cover-up is over, that the Prime Minister has agreed that all the witnesses in his office and other ministerial offices, and the Prime Minister himself, will all come before a parliamentary committee to testify under oath about what happened in this scandal.
If they do that, then I will grant the mercy of ending this speech and allowing them to go back to bragging about their deficit spending and their tax increases. They could do it all day long, every day, until October when voters will render a swift verdict against those policies as well.
However, the fact remains that there are enormous and glaring contradictions between the Prime Minister's personal utterances and the now publicly available evidence to the contrary, evidence that the Prime Minister would like us to ignore and sweep under the table, that he would like to bury under tens of billions of dollars of borrowed money that he has piled into this pre-election budget.
Our answer to him is no. We are not going to allow him to bury the truth. We are going to stand here and we are going to speak up, and we are going to use every tool in the parliamentary tool kit to end the Prime Minister's cover-up and get to the truth.
For a moment I would like to comment on the methodology of the cover-up itself. We have talked about the apparent crime and now let us talk about the cover-up. The government came forward with a massive new deficit spending budget. It is a promise-breaking deficit. During the last election, the Prime Minister promised that he would have three tiny deficits never to exceed $10 billion, followed by a balanced budget in the year 2019. In fact, as he put it, “the budget will balance itself”. That was supposed to happen in the here and now. Instead, we have had deficits that have already totalled $60 billion, which is three times the total he promised. As well, the budget deficit this year is $20 billion more. Again, this is in a year in which there was supposed to be no deficit.
Now in this pre-election budget, in order to distract from the Prime Minister's SNC-Lavalin scandal, he added $41 billion in new cash spending. He is basically taking a fire hose and spraying cash in all directions in the hopes that grateful Canadian voters will be distracted from his personal conduct and vote for him in spite of all that he has done. However, Canadians know that spending to distract from a scandal before an election is always followed by higher taxes after the election. That is exactly what is happening in this case.
As I said earlier, this is a Kathleen Wynne three-step: massive scandal, massive spending to distract from that scandal and massive tax increases to pay for it all after the election is over.
What evidence do we have of the Liberals' intention to raise taxes after the election? Let us start with the first and most obvious piece, which is that they have already done it once. The best indicator of future behaviour is past behaviour. The government came into office promising it would never raise taxes on the middle class and then it went ahead and did exactly that. It took away the children's fitness tax credit, the public transit tax credit and income splitting, which made life a little fairer for families with a single income or where one spouse earned more than another. The government raised the CPP premiums and even targeted small businesses, with specific tax increases going to small family-owned operations. Those tax increases penalized companies that shared the earnings and work among family members or that saved within the company itself. All of those tax increases have happened already.
According to a non-partisan and impartial study by the Fraser Institute, the average middle-class family is paying $800 more in income taxes than when the government first took office. That does not even include increases to payroll taxes or the carbon tax, which just took effect in Ontario, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan today.
These tax increases already exist. Canadians know that if a government is going to raise their taxes once, it will raise their taxes again, and it has tried. It has tried to implement other tax increases that we stopped through massive political pressure and public backlash.
Let us go through the list of taxes the government tried and failed to raise. It tried to take away the disability tax credit from diabetics and families with autistic children, which would have raised the taxes on those families by about $1,000. It backed off after we exposed its doing it. The government then tried to put in a new tax on health and dental benefits. This tax increase was exposed through a series of media leaks, showing that the finance department, under the leadership of the minister, was quietly doing the research and laying the groundwork to raise taxes on anyone who dared have a dental or supplementary health plan. Again through relentless pressure from Her Majesty's loyal opposition and an uprising by Canadian workers who cherish their health benefits, the government had to back down from that tax increase as well.
The government tried to impose a tax on the passive income of small businesses of as high as 73%. It had to put that tax change on ice after a group of farmers, shopkeepers and pizza-shop owners rose up and fought back. It tried to double the tax on small business owners who transfer their businesses from father to son, or mother to daughter. This tax increase would have made the tax twice as high for a farmer to transfer his farm to his son, as it would if that farmer was to transfer the farm to a foreign multinational corporation. That would have ensured that, within one generation, our farmers would be tenants on their ancestral farmlands, rather than owners of the land passed down from generation to generation. Thank goodness the Liberal government, under relentless pressure from the opposition side of the House of Commons, put those tax increases on hold until after the election, when it no longer needs the voters but still needs their money.
That brings us to the reason the Liberals need people's money. The finance minister has been growing spending at a rate of about 7% a year, two and a half times the combined rate of inflation and population growth. When spending grows faster than revenue, over the long run, taxes end up being raised to pay for it. Sure, it can borrow in the short run to pay for it but that makes the problem worse, because not only does the government have to pay for the spending into the future but it has to pay for the interest on all of the growing debt. That interest is growing.
Two years ago, we paid $23 billion in annual federal debt interest. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, interest payments will rise to almost $40 billion over the next five years. In other words, we will spend as much on debt interest as we now spend on health care transfers, money for bankers and bondholders instead of doctors and nurses. Who will pay for all of that interest? It will be taxpayers. There is no free money out there and those bondholders on Bay Street and Wall Street do not lend us money out of charity. They expect to get back in return more than they lent us in the first place. That is the way it works. It is government-run capitalism where people get rich by feeding off the state, feeding off big government, at the expense of working-class taxpayers.
That is an example of a wealth transfer, one that people too often forget about. Those who claim they believe so fervently in social justice have no problem whatsoever taking money from the lady who bags groceries at the corner store to pay interest on the national debt to wealthy multi-millionaire bondholders who own the government's debt. It is a direct transfer from the have-nots to the have-yachts, and it is a transfer of wealth with which the Liberal government seems to have no problem as it carries out an unprecedented engorgement of spending that will cost working-class families, present and yet unborn. That is the reality of the debt and we know that debt will metastasize into tax increases if not brought under control in the near future.
We have seen the consequences of rising debt right here in the province of Ontario, where Kathleen Wynne and Dalton McGuinty, the Prime Minister's two mentors, whose policy agendas were crafted by Gerald Butts, made Ontario the most indebted jurisdiction in all of North America, more debt as a share of GDP than any of the 50 states or 10 provinces. Now the province is faced with a $14-billion deficit and nothing but ugly decisions ahead of it.
One would think that the Prime Minister would learn from the mistakes of his mentors, that they would sit him down and say, knowing he is trying to follow in their footsteps, please learn from the errors of our ways, but apparently they have not. He will make the same mistakes over and over again, as is customary when people do not learn from history. Today's debt will mean tomorrow's taxes if the Prime Minister is re-elected.
I do not need to talk just about tomorrow. I can talk about today. Today is April Fool's Day, and the joke is on taxpayers. They have shown up at gas stations across Ontario and Saskatchewan, and they have seen gas prices rise. They are up four cents in just one day. However, do not be fooled because it is April 1. It is only the beginning.
The Prime Minister admits, and this is in the government's published documents, that the tax will more than double from $20 today to $50-per-tonne of carbon in three years. He will not tell us how much that tax will actually cost people. Sure, the government puts out public relations documents claiming that the full implementation of the carbon tax will cost a family of two in Ontario only about $600. That assumes that the government is telling the truth.
Carbon taxes are notoriously insidious, because all the costs are embedded in literally millions of products. Anything made with or transported by energy becomes more expensive. Sometimes that expense compounds. A single product, such as a plastic pipe, has petroleum products in it. The carbon tax makes the raw material more expensive. Heating the factory then becomes more expensive, and operating the machinery to run the systems becomes more expensive. In most provinces where we use gas or coal to electrify our economy, electricity becomes more expensive. When the product is finally manufactured, it has to be transported to a store, and that transportation is more expensive.
We can see that for one product, the tax is compounded over and over again until it finally reaches the storefront, where the consumer buys it and pays HST not just on the product but on all the carbon tax pricing embedded in the product. That is a tax on a tax.
The Prime Minister admits, in the government's own documents, which claim that an Ontario family will pay just $600 in carbon taxes, that the $600 does not include the HST on the tax, the tax on the tax. Right there we have an admission that this is a lot more expensive as a scheme than he has thus far admitted. Furthermore, even if the government takes out the HST, can we really believe that it will cost just $600 in Ontario or $1,000 in Saskatchewan? The answer is no.
I filed something called an access to information request to get all the documents that point to the cost of the carbon tax so that I could publish them for the Canadian people. There is good news and bad news. The good news is that I got the documents. The bad news is that all the numbers are blacked out. In other words, one can find out that it costs money, just not how much.
Canadians are expected to just take the Prime Minister at his word when he says that the carbon tax will cost just $600 in Ontario. If he is right, why would he not release all the source documents and put them out there and let the chips fall where they may? If I am wrong and, in fact, the carbon tax does not cost a penny more than $600 bucks in Ontario and $1,000 in Saskatchewan, he could put the unredacted documents out and let everyone analyze them for accuracy.
The excuse the government is giving is that the numbers represent advice by public servants to ministers, which is always confidential. However, I am not looking for advice. I am looking for the numbers. There is a difference between dollar value and advice. The public servants may have recommended one particular model of carbon tax, which would be advice. I would be fine with that being blacked out, because that's what the act says. However, that is not what is blacked out. What is blacked out is the cost to Canadian families of the carbon tax.
If members want to know the difference between dollar value and advice, take a trip to a restaurant and ask the waiter what he recommends. His recommendation would be advice. However, the price on the menu would not be advice. The price might lead to a recommendation, but it is not itself a recommendation. Therefore, the government's legal justification for blacking out these numbers is false, which is why the Information Commissioner is investigating Finance Canada and Environment Canada.
The preliminary finding of the commissioner is that, in fact, no, the information is not to be redacted. It is to be made public. However, we continue to wait and wait, presumably until after the election, to find out the true cost of the carbon tax, because the government is confusing two different concepts: advice versus price. Canadians want to know the price of the carbon tax. How can we do a cost-benefit analysis if we do not know the cost? It is half the equation. It is the difference between these two different things that is profoundly at the heart of my complaint to the Information Commissioner.
I believe that, ultimately, if the government does not relent, eventually the Information Commissioner might have to take the government to court and demand the full and final disclosure of this material. They do not have to take it that far. Let us not spend money on lawyers. Let us not go before a court. Let us not have the government found to be covering up something else. Remember, the reason is it in so much trouble right now is because of a cover-up. It does not need to extend scandal cover-up to a carbon tax cover-up. Just give us the numbers and then let Canadians decide if this tax and this government are worth the price.
I hear a member across the way asking if that is it. Just end the cover-ups, and that will be it. The member for Kingston across the way can have relief—