Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today in the House to speak to the budget implementation act. This is the first time for me as a new member of Parliament to speak to a federal budget. It is hard to believe I have been here 19 months, but this is our first budget.
I am here to speak about what it means for my constituents in Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry and for our country. It is very hard, in 10 minutes, to put all my thoughts together on a federal budget, but I will do my best.
We are talking about $300 billion in revenue and $50 billion in expenses equalling a deficit of $350 billion last year. Finally, after two years, we got a federal budget. That is important because we have seen a lot of money go out the door for those in need. The Conservatives have supported programs that have helped people, but we need this accountability, we need this framework. We need the whole picture of the budget to see what is happening in our country for both short and long-term fiscal sustainability.
We have had different world wars and a global pandemic a century ago. At no time have in our history have gone this long without a budget. The United States and the United Kingdom, which I cite often in the House, never skipped a beat and were able to continue to produce budgets throughout. Nevertheless, we are here. We have a document and we are able to comment on it.
In my limited time, I want to focus on two key themes. I call them the two Ds: debt and delivering. Frankly, this budget does not take our financial realities seriously. The Liberal government and the Prime Minister have accumulated more debt in the last six years than every other government and prime minister combined before them. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars. I acknowledge again that we supported many of those programs because it was the right thing to do to help people in need, but they were some of the highest per capita in the developed world in terms of spending.
Recently, I was looking at the OECD website when I was putting my speech together. When we look at our unemployment rate compared to similar G7 countries, Canada stands at 8.1%. The G7 average at that time was 5.6%. We can all watch Japan in amazement. It has an incredible unemployment rate of 2.6%. We have spent nearly the most to get the least amount of results with respect to our outlook and moving forward past COVID.
My political science degree from Carleton University comes in handy in looking at some of the history of budgeting and our fiscal realities in our country. The Parliamentary Budget Officer recently said that at best we would have a 1% maybe 2% growth. For the amount of money we have spent and the times we are in, other economies are growing at a much faster rate.
The reason I believe my political science degree comes in handy today is when we go back and look at the amount of debt. When we go back a generation ago and look at the debt under the first Trudeau government of the day, the challenge of the PC government and Brian Mulroney and into Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin's Liberal governments, interest rates truly hurt our economic outlook. It was increased interest rates, not in the short term when the debt was acquired but over the course of time that led to significant structural deficits.
Under a Liberal government, under Jean Chrétien and finance minister Paul Martin, we saw cuts to health and social programs in an effort to get our budget sustainable. I worry we could be in the same situation. The numbers we are seeing today, even in contrast, are astronomically larger than we saw back a generation ago when I was just starting out in elementary school. Nevertheless, that lesson is important.
I say this respectfully, but I get frustrated when I look at this. We cannot get things done very easily anymore. Let us look at the slow vaccine rollout. We are now acquiring a higher and higher deficit because we did not secure vaccines early enough so we could reopen and get our small businesses and jobs back on track. We would have been able to wind down our support programs because our economy was reopening. The United Kingdom and the United States have been successfully procuring vaccines, getting them into the arms of their citizens which has allowed them to start to reopen. Their numbers are quite safe lately so they have been able to do that.
We talk about getting things done. I look at the United Kingdom. It was in a similar situation to Canada in not having domestic vaccine procurement in its country. Under the leadership of the U.K. government, when COVID hit, it put in a “wartime-like effort” to build domestic capacity within its country. It worked tooth and nail and when vaccines were approved and ready to be manufactured, the U.K. was able to do it and look after its citizens.
In Canada, the Prime Minister took one year to make an announcement in North York and Toronto to much fanfare. If we look at the website, the facility will be ready in 2027. There is a direct contrast there. The United Kingdom and Canada took two different approaches and had two different results, which is very clear today.
That builds on my second point, which is delivering. Notice that the title of the bill is not just the budget act, but it is the budget implementation act. I am a Conservative member who represents a rural eastern Ontario riding. The word “deliverology” was a big word the new Liberal government of the day used in 2015. It splashed it out in cabinet retreats. It had speakers talk about how “deliverology” was going to be the way of the Liberal government. I hope the Liberals fired that guy. Actually, they did because we do not hear that word anymore.
The key theme in a lot of my speeches is that the government, and I will give it a compliment, is the best in the game with respect to making announcements and making us feel good. However, it does not have the ability to properly implement what it says it wants to do. It gets an A for announcement, but an F for follow-through.
Regardless of where we sit in the House, we have to ask ourselves, when we see some of these items, if we actually rehash them over and over again, will we see a different result? How many times have we seen the Liberal government commit to national child care? Over and over again, it promised that this time would be the year it would get it done. Interprovincial trade has come up numerous times with very little progress. Every target it has set for itself with respect to the environment it has failed to meet.
I think of infrastructure projects in my riding, and I am appreciative and I ensure we get our fair share of dollars at home, but we need timely announcements of those projects. In South Glengarry, the Char-Lan rink got approval for funding. That is wonderful. However, it got the money too late and cannot go to tender this year. Now this infrastructure project is delayed likely for another year before it is completed.
I want to acknowledge the situation, a perfect example, and I do not want to say national shame, of Lac-Mégantic. It has been eight years since that disaster happened. I can still remember the images of that horrible day. I watched it as a staffer on Parliament Hill. I remember the lives that were lost and the anger and frustration that this had happened. We are now looking at maybe the year 2024 the government says. We are still under negotiation. We are still looking for more details. It is still not out to tender. There is still not a shovel in the ground. My colleague today successfully passed a resolution, calling for this to be recommitted to. How is it that on something so vital, a national disaster of that scale, it is taking us over a decade at least to get that project done?
We are losing the ability to get things done in a reasonable and timely manner. The dollars we spend in a federal budget need to be timely, targeted and temporary for our sustainability. Saying we are going to spend money is not a result. We have to check projects off, make tangible differences and put that money to proper, efficient use. There is virtue-signalling, there is talking a good game and there is actually delivering.
We have an amazing country, with great businesses and great people, but the government's inability to deliver is hampering our recovery. I hope we can get better implementation of the budget.