Mr. Speaker, Canadians want their lives back, and they were expecting to hear news today that the government had fixed its failures so that Canada will not be at the back of the pack to receive pandemic relief in the form of a vaccine that would give them their lives back. With the highest unemployment, other than Italy, in all of the G7, they were expecting a plan for paycheques; instead, they got a plan for more credit card debt. About $400 billion will be added to our national credit card this year, which is eight times bigger than the previous all-time national average.
While the Conservatives supported the CERB, the small business loans and the wage subsidies, those account for less than half of that record-smashing deficit. In fact, we have gone from a debt-to-GDP ratio of 30% to 56%, now within view of the default levels that we hit in the 1990s when Liberals were forced to slash health care to deal with the massive debt crisis that existed at that time. We are not at the cliff or even on the edge of the cliff. We can now see the cliff, and this government is running toward it as quickly as humanly possible, with the biggest deficit by far in all of the G20.
The government spent the most to achieve the least. With all that spending, we are going to be at the back of the pack on vaccinations, we have the second-highest unemployment in the G7 and we could not get rapid testing approved in time to get Canadians safely back to their lives.
The minister has said that she would impose “limits” on our debt to avoid the brutal constraints of the marketplace. Will she tell us today, when speaking of the debt, what exactly those limits are?