Mr. Speaker, maybe to the chagrin of my Liberal colleagues across the way, this is not my farewell statement. They will have to put up with me a little longer. I listened to a lot of the statements made by retiring members and, again, I offer a heartfelt thanks for their service to Canada.
There are some members like the member for Victoria, whom I appreciated working with on several committees. I know that many of us will miss him. Even though he was a New Democrat, he was one we could have a decent argument with and come away still friends at the end of the day.
There is a Yiddish proverb that says, “If you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people he gives it to.” That is what I want to start with. I know I have a 20-minute statement on the budget with questions and answers. I am not splitting my time. I do not want to do that, but I want to talk about this Yiddish proverb because the government has spent a prodigious amount of money over the last four years. We know that today's debt is tomorrow's taxes.
The government now has a total debt of $705 billion. If one includes Crown corporation debt, it is over $1 trillion. I know there will be Liberal MPs who will say to look at the previous government, which increased the national debt as well. The counter-argument is that they had the Great Recession in 2008-09. As I remember it, the Liberal Party members clamoured for more spending. They actually wrote a coalition document with the New Democrats and the separatist Bloc Québécois, demanding even more spending. The government of the day decided that it would find a middle ground and not spend us off a cliff, but that it would do what the House of Commons was indicating, which was to spend cyclically into the economy.
Budget 2019, which this bill tends to introduce and make real in the lives of people, I call it a distraction budget. Last year, I called it the refrigerator budget. There is an extra $41.3 billion of new spending over five years. The campaign promise of the Liberal Party was that there was supposed to be a surplus of $1 billion this year. It is a $19.8-billion deficit instead, $19.7 billion the year that follows, $14.8 billion in the year after, and $14.1 billion the year after that. It is successive years of deficits.
If we look at the financial statements on the—