Madam Speaker, at long last, two years after the last budget presented by the Liberals, it is a pleasure to rise today to speak to their latest proposal to Canadians.
We remember that the budget at that time was very much crafted and timed to distract attention away from what we all now remember as the SNC-Lavalin scandal. That budget was tabled when the Prime Minister was avoiding questions and was under intense pressure. We would later learn, through the tabling in this House of the report of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, the Trudeau II report, that the Prime Minister did indeed interfere in the prosecution of his friends at SNC-Lavalin.
Here we are now, in the middle of a pandemic. Last spring, the government had no intention of introducing a budget. In the meantime, the Liberals have shut down Parliament to avoid tough questions about another scandal that involves this Prime Minister where members of his family received half a million dollars. He then gave that organization half a billion dollars because it needed a bailout. Of course, those are his friends at the WE organization.
We did not get a budget when we returned to Parliament in the fall. Instead, what we got was a Speech from the Throne, which does not match this budget. It was followed by committees being filibustered. We are not talking about just one or two committees. We are talking about the ethics committee and the finance committee, which should have been dealing with pre-budget consultations. We are talking about the procedure and House affairs committee, and of course the national defence committee was filibustered too.
Finally this spring, we have a budget from the government. While the last budget was tabled in its form to cover up the tough questions being asked as a result of the SNC-Lavalin scandal, which saw the Prime Minister fire Canada's first female indigenous attorney general, and kick her and Dr. Jane Philpott out of caucus for speaking truth to power. We now have a budget tabled during a pandemic, and it really is a remarkable opportunity. The government has the runway to make investments in provincial health care.
We hear an awful lot from the government about the $8 in $10 that was spent in relief funds during this pandemic coming from the federal government. I can give another number that the government might find helpful: 100% of the money spent by governments during the pandemic came from taxpayers.
Therefore, here we are in the third wave of the pandemic, and the third wave of lockdowns, and the health care system is bursting at its seams. The health care system had funding challenges before the pandemic. During the 2019 election, the Conservatives made specific commitments with respect to increasing health transfers to the provinces.
The pandemic is in full swing. We are in the third wave. There are lockdowns. Hospitals are screaming for help, and provinces need more resources. However, we are not seeing, in this historic document from the government, that investment in the provinces and in health care. I started talking about health care, of course, because we are in the middle of a global pandemic.
There is another item that was noticeably absent. Members in this House will recall and members on the government side will remember that the House did move to adopt a national three-digit suicide prevention hotline. It is a tremendously important initiative, 988, so that Canadians from coast to coast to coast know that those three digits are all they need to remember in a time of crisis. We have seen the effect this pandemic has had with respect to the mental health of all Canadians, and there has really not been a lot of the heavy lifting the government would need to do to implement that motion, which was adopted by this House. It is also missing.
When these items that we know would be incredibly helpful, timely and life saving are absent, their absence from the budget speaks to the intent. The intent, of course, and the reason there is so much preamble in the budget, and I think it is the longest budget in terms of number of pages we have ever seen in this country, is because it is meant to resemble an election platform.
I will note that I will be splitting my time with the member for Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, and I look forward to his intervention to talk a little more about why this is not a pandemic relief budget, not a jobs budget and not an economic recovery budget but, in fact, an election budget.
I received a call at my office yesterday from Helen, a constituent who is quite concerned about the fate of our country. I think that is pretty normal. We all have great hopes and aspirations for what our county will look like. Now, Helen is in her nineties, so she has seen a lot of changes in this country. She has been around for a lot of days. However, Helen's concerns are not for her next days, but for her great-grandchildren's. She is wondering what is going to happen when we have more debt wracked up by this Prime Minister than all the debt wracked up by all the prime ministers previous to him. She wonders who will pay that back.
Concerning the urgency to introduce a budget, we did not expect that from this government, because this Prime Minister, of course, famously said that the budget would balance itself and that we would have very modest deficits during his first term. Now, of course, during the Liberals' first mandate, there was not a global pandemic or a global economic recession, but they blew the doors off the bank and plunged our country deep into deficits. Then, when they got another mandate, they found themselves in crisis and plunged us even further with new deficits and a much larger debt, breaking the $1-trillion mark.
There was spending that had to happen during the pandemic, and I am talking about important measures such as the Canada emergency wage subsidy. For that, the government proposed 10%, but the opposition parties said that was not enough and that it needed to be more. Members will hear the Liberals say, “Oh well, the opposition says we are spending too much money, but they do not seem to want us to spend any money.”
Well, we want them to spend targeted money. It is not just about spraying hundreds of billions of dollars and hoping for electoral fortune as a result. We want targeted measures that help Canadians' livelihoods and their lives. That is why that 75% emergency wage subsidy received the unanimous support of all parties in the House.
However, there are a number of things that this government ought to have done with this budget document that it failed to do. Just like Helen, when we look at what the budget should be focused on compared with what the Liberals did focus on, we are left wondering, my goodness, who will pay for this debt hangover. Certainly it will be Helen's great-grandchildren, which does, of course, give her reason to be concerned.
The debt has, as referenced by my colleagues, become a bit of a time bomb for this country. We need to hope and pray that we do not end up in a situation with rising interest rates where our debt servicing costs eclipse our ability to be able to transfer more money to the provinces. The Prime Minister has said that he would give more money to the provinces for health care when the health care emergency is over. I am not really sure how we ended up with that as the best case.
Right now, Canadians are looking for targeted measures, such as for the tourism sector. We were looking forward to the government wanting to climb down into local jurisdictions, helping with chambers of commerce that are seeking rapid tests for its businesses that are employing people in the community. While we find ourselves in this third wave of lockdowns, this third wave of the pandemic, we expected something more than an election document and a lifetime of debt from this government.
We look forward to continuing to review it, but I have as many questions for the members opposite as I am sure they have for me.