Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Minister of Finance introduced her first budget to Canadians in over two years, two years of uncertainty for small businesses trying to plan for an ever more uncertain future, two years of careful spending by new Canadians not aware of the promises they were made entering this country for the first time and two years of economic room for our country's once strong industries that millions of Canadians have relied upon.
Yesterday, instead of delivering a clear, measured and outcome-driven budget, the Minister of Finance gave Canadians a glimpse of the political opportunity this pandemic has provided for her government. The idea of this budget is not to build back better, but to build back bigger, with a large reach of control of government into the individual lives of Canadians. It is full of big promises and expensive programs and, based upon past performance, it will likely lead to disappointing results.
There will be $101.4 billion in new spending, including $30 billion toward a national child care plan. That is an important initiative that Conservatives support, but it should not be one size that fills all and the devil is in the details. The Liberals' big headline, which they are good at, is that $10 a day will be the average cost for child care. This does not mean all Canadians will have access to $10-a-day child care. The government has had five years to develop this plan with the co-operation of provinces and it still has to be negotiated.
Extending pandemic business and health supports until this economy gets back on its feet will of course be required and there is an increase in the federal minimum wage. There are promises for $17.6 billion in green investments. While all of these promises sound wonderful, I am afraid we will again be reminded of the government's failure to deliver on fiscal promises. Six years ago, the Prime Minister's election platform vowed to run modest budget deficits prior to balancing the budget at the end of his first term. The government has since abandoned this goal. It set four annual deficit targets and each of them was missed. The Liberals are masters at the big gesture and bold headlines, but they consistently do not deliver, so why should we believe them about this budget?
In late 2020, the Prime Minister announced that his temporary spending measures would not become a fixture for the federal government. He committed to balancing the budget in the future without any indication of a timeline and while Liberals assert that their accumulated debt is manageable, long-term projections indicate that massive federal stimulus spending during the pandemic will result in deficits for multiple decades.
Remember when Liberals told us they had the best vaccine portfolio in the G7. That was in December and look at where we are now. Canada is getting slammed by the third wave of variants. Canadians are seeing an extension of time between the first and second doses and less than 3% of the population is fully vaccinated. It says it is an open and transparent government. It prorogued Parliament and shut down the ethics, defence and finance committees while shining the light on important scandals, particularly around sexual harassment. In 2015, the federal government vowed to reduce its debt-to-GDP ratio to 27% and that was not done. It failed to deliver on a pledge to end boil water advisories by March 2021 in indigenous communities and that was not done. The Prime Minister told Liberal Party members at a closed event for the Minister of Public Services and Procurement that all Canadians are likely to be vaccinated by June. That is not going to happen.
These failed promises are just the tip of the iceberg. We cannot depend on the government to execute any of its promises and programs. The government must recognize that there can be no implementation of programs, supports or initiatives aimed toward economic recovery without a solution to this health crisis. As the rest of the world continues to receive vaccines and return to a sense of normalcy, Canada has fallen behind, not only in the past few weeks but since the inception of COVID-19.
In the midst of the third wave, Canadians are struggling to cope with the rise of COVID-19 cases with increased lockdowns and the effects of the struggling economy. We are in the middle of the biggest health crisis in Canadian history. The provincial premiers have called for a long-term funding plan that ensures they will have the resources to make sure we are prepared for when, not if, this happens again. There is nothing in this budget that addresses the long-term resiliency of our health care system, which is what the premiers have been asking for.
Canadians are having a hard time coping with the current spike, hospitalizations are up, ICU admissions are soaring, businesses are closed and workers are losing their jobs or having their hours cut. This demonstrates what poor planning and the failure to procure health provisions looks like. It has consequences for Canadians.
The mental health crisis that our communities have been struggling with across Canada deepens. Canadians are worried about their future. In the United States, cases and hospitalizations are dropping. Businesses are opening. They are going out to sports games. That is because the U.S. population is getting vaccinated. Our current situation in Canada was avoidable.
Monday's federal budget outlines how the federal Liberals propose to rebuild the Canadian economy in a way that brings all Canadians along. Apparently the minister does not consider those Canadians who rely on this country's agricultural, energy, forestry, fisheries or other natural resources to be Canadian. Just as the government has continued to do since 2015, Canada's natural resources were ignored in the equation for economic recovery. There is no mention of the energy sector, which is Canada's number one export.
Snubbing the strength of Canada's resource forestry sectors among others, the government has failed to recognize the impact these sectors would have on our battered economy. The world wants and needs more of our natural resources and we should be thinking about expanding market share rather than hastening its decline. The least we could do is lessen our dependency on foreign supply because we have it all here.
The budget continues to go down a path we have seen before with Liberal governments, funding programs that they believe will increase productivity and innovation, but past results tell a different story. Canada fell out of the top 10 ranking of the world's most competitive economies and we have fallen near the bottom of our peer group on innovation, ranking 17th, with those existing programs that the Liberals are adding money to. How is this federal spending going to position our country for post-pandemic success? In never-before-seen stimulus spending, where is our strategic economic vision for the future? How will this affect generations for years to come? On the debt the government is holding now, we are paying about $20 billion in interest, soon to be $40 billion. How are we going to pay for our debt burden if interest rates continue to rise?
Debt-to-GDP ratio is going to rise and it is getting close to that near default number in 1996. Titled “A Recovery Plan for Jobs, Growth, and Resilience”, the federal Liberal government's budget contains $497.6 billion in total spending. However, from what I was able to distinguish from the speech, there is no actual plan for job growth that they are referring to. Instead there are vague references to growing green jobs and retraining the workforce toward new jobs. We have heard lots of noise about retraining for jobs that do not exist yet. The need for tradespeople only happens if we can approve something and get it built in this country. Growth has to be led by the private sector. The high cost of doing business in Canada, with red tape and over-regulation, creates an impossible environment for small business. There is nothing here that reduces import costs and increases competitiveness.
There is nothing in the budget that deals with the attraction of investment into Canada, nothing that demonstrates Canada is open for business and if we want something or need something built, Canada is the place to do it. There is nothing here that would encourage Canadians themselves to invest in Canadian businesses and little mention of advancing projects that are under review and accelerating that review.
My fear for the future is that this budget will do more than invest massive sums of money into under-tested, under-productive schemes that serve the government's political agenda. Canadians need more than a plan to keep them home and promises to retrain them for jobs that do not exist. They need a plan that will get them outside and back to work. At the end of the day, Canadians will be left with more joblessness, higher taxes and an unimaginable tax burden for Canada's youth.
The most important investment our country can make is getting Canadians employed in our country. The Conservative Party of Canada would implement the Canada recovery plan, a plan that would recover the hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in the hardest-hit sectors. It is time we start building, producing and growing in Canada again. Clearly the rest of the world is interested in buying value-added products, commodities and Canadian expertise, but there is little in the budget that demonstrates our future will include an economic recovery that plays to our strengths.
All in all, there appear to be a few positive measures in this budget put forward, specifically those that will continue to support Canadians in their time of need as they struggle to get through this pandemic. Nonetheless, our party will be sure to scrutinize and review the budget in great detail. Canadians deserve a robust plan for recovery and one that will instill confidence in our ability to grow and build back stronger than ever before.