Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock.
It is great to see you back in person, Mr. Speaker. It has been far too long and so much has changed. For one, you are the proud owner of another $10,000 of debt. Yes, that is the per capita share of every man, woman and child in Canada. A $380-billion deficit this year for 38 million Canadians equals $10,000 per Canadian or $40,000 for a family of four. I do not know about you, Mr. Speaker, but I have not met a lot of people who will tell me that their family has received $40,000 in COVID relief benefits.
In fact, even if people received the CERB for a full 16 weeks, it works out to $8,000, and the majority of Canadians did not even receive that CERB. Although their mortgages are $40,000 bigger, they do not have 40 thousand dollars' worth of benefits to show for it. That is so often the case with trickle-down government. The hard-working taxpayer has to climb the bureaucratic mountain with a big bucket of water on his back, that water is then poured into the federal bureaucracy. It is sloshed around down to provincial and municipal bureaucracies and then given on to other delivery bodies. Just as he gets back to the bottom of that bureaucratic mountain, there are a few drops that trickle down back into that bucket he so laboriously took to the top of the hill in the first place.
The government will tell that taxpayer and all Canadians that we are in a crisis, thus justifying a deficit of this magnitude. It is true, we do have a crisis. We will put aside for a moment the fact that the government made the crisis worse by allowing tens of thousands of people from the most infected regions of the world to come into the country after military intelligence warned it of the danger. We will ignore the fact that many of the programs the government designed since that time punished businesses for reopening and punished workers for working. We will ignore all of those failings and grant that indeed this is a crisis, but it is not our first crisis.
Indeed we have fought world wars and had the Great Depression and the great recession. How does this deficit compare to those deficits? It would not be fair just to point out that our $380-billion deficit is seven times the previous all-time record, because that does not adjust for GDP and inflation. To be fair, let us compare the deficit as a share of GDP in inflation-adjusted terms.
This year, the federal deficit is 17% of GDP. To compare, in the worst year of World War I, it was 8% of GDP; in the worst year of the Great Depression, it was 6% of GDP; and in the worst year of the great global recession, it was 4% of GDP. To put it in perspective, our deficit today is twice what it was in World War I, three times what it was in the Great Depression and four times what it was in the great global recession, all adjusted for the economy and inflation.
Only once in our history has the deficit been bigger as a share of our economy, and that was in 1943 when the government was selling bonds to its people so that it could fight Hitler, Mussolini and Imperial Japan. The government put those dollars to work to win the war, and yes there was a deficit of 23% of GDP that year, but do members know what was different? When our soldiers came back from battle, one might have expected that, exhausted and heartbroken from loss, they would want to take a prolonged vacation and put it on the national credit card and let future generations pay the bill, but they did exactly the opposite.
Do people know how long it took our grandparents to balance the budget after they came back from the war? It took them one year, and within two years they were running the largest budget surplus in Canadian history, 5% of GDP, which is the equivalent of $120 billion in today's relative terms. They fought for our freedom and then they fought for our finances.
Imagine if we had a government today with even a modicum of the integrity, respect and honour that our grandparents had those many years ago. Would we not be in much better shape?
However, here we are today with a Prime Minister who not only effortlessly and carelessly spends our money, but tells us that money is not even a real thing anymore. Yesterday, in his bizarre address to the nation, he told us that spending more actually costs less. I am not joking. Members can look it up. That is what he actually said: Spending more money costs less. Clearly, things now mean the opposite of what they say. This is not 1947. This is 1984, and we have a government engaged in doublespeak about the meaning of money.
The Liberals tell us that we can afford all of this debt because interest rates are low, and they are right: Interest rates are incredibly low, stoked by the fact that central banks are producing an unprecedented amount of fake money through keystrokes at their bureaus. However, those rates are not going to be low forever. Unless we believe that the debt will be paid off before the rates rise, we have to believe that we will have trouble down the road. The government is not planning to pay back the debt, ever. In fact, its own projections suggest that the debt will grow every year forever. Are they really expecting us to believe that never in the future will we return to normal interest rates?
Let me put it into perspective. This year, the effective interest rate across all of our debt will be somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2%. That is not the bond yield today but the average across the entire stock of federal debt. It is about 2%. The average over the last two decades is 5%. Do members know what the difference is between 5% and 2%?