Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my friend, the hon. member for Elgin—Middlesex—London.
It took the government two years to table a budget, this in the midst of a social, health and economic crisis that this country has not experienced in generations. In the face of that, one would have expected the government to put forward a comprehensive economic plan to get Canada out of this crisis and on the road to recovery.
This budget is a long budget. It is a 739-page budget. Despite its length, when it comes to the fundamentals of getting Canada's economy back on track, it is, to put it generously, wanting. This budget has no plan to get Canadians vaccinated, no plan to get Canada's economy safely reopened and no plan to encourage innovation. There is no plan to address Canada's lagging competitiveness or attract investment to Canada. Simply put, when it comes to growing Canada's economy, when it comes to getting Canadians back to work and when it comes to sending a message to the rest of the world that yes, indeed, Canada is once again open for business, this budget misses the mark.
What this budget does do is usher in a sea of red ink, the likes of which this country has never seen. This budget provides for, last year, a deficit of $354 billion. To put that in some context, the deficit for last year is three and a half times the size of the total debt that the government accumulated of $100 billion prior to COVID.
It is hardly as though the government had a record of being good fiscal stewards prior to COVID. Indeed, the government left the cupboard bare during the good times, leaving Canada in a fiscally vulnerable position to weather the COVID storm. That is why, within months of COVID after the first tranche of COVID-related spending, Canada's credit rating was downgraded by Fitch and S&P threatened to do the same unless the government reversed course and got back on track with a fiscally responsible approach.
This budget does not provide any confidence in that regard. This budget will result in the national debt rising to $1.4 trillion by the end of this year, which is double the national debt from a little more than a year ago. That is truly staggering.
This budget will put the Prime Minister in the history books, but for all the wrong reasons. The Prime Minister will go down in history as the Prime Minister who accumulated more debt in the span of seven years than all Canadian prime ministers combined going back to Canada's founding in 1867. Again, that is hardly a record to be proud of.
In the face of all of this red ink, it is no surprise that there was no plan to get Canada's fiscal house in order and no plan to eventually see a return to a balanced budget, which the government inherited from the previous Conservative government under Stephen Harper, and completely missing from the budget was any meaningful fiscal anchor.
The only plan this budget provided is for spending, spending and more spending, burdening future generations like never before, with no end to deficits. This budget lays the framework for forever deficits.
The government likes to say that as we are in a pandemic, we have no choice and these are unprecedented times. That is true, and the COVID pandemic has necessitated some significant spending to help Canadians and businesses get through it, because Canadians are out of work and businesses are unable to operate in the way they were prior to COVID. At every step of the way, we in the official opposition have tried to work constructively with the government to see that there is targeted support and that it is delivered in a timely way to Canadians and Canadian businesses that need help. However, the government's excuse that all of its spending, deficit and debt are attributable to COVID can only go so far.
Under this budget, total program spending for the fiscal year 2021-22 is projected to be $475.6 billion. Of that $475.6 billion, only about 12% is related to COVID. In other words, 88% or so of the government's total program spending is unrelated to COVID. When we consider the $475.6 billion in program spending, that is an increase of a staggering 40.5% from 2019-20 levels.
What this budget contains is massive spending, including billions and billions of dollars of new permanent program spending, despite the fact that the Prime Minister's mandate letter to the Minister of Finance called on the minister not to include any new permanent spending. It turns out that the Prime Minister's mandate letter to the minister was not worth the paper it was written on.
The government hangs its hat on and touts the $101.4 billion in so-called stimulus spending. However, the Parliamentary Budget Officer notes that only $36.8 billion of that so-called stimulus spending is related to COVID, leaving $69.2 billion in so-called stimulus spending. The catch, however, is that, of the $69.2 billion in so-called stimulus spending, some $52.1 billion does not go out the door until 2022 and all the way to 2024. In other words, it will have no immediate impact, which is the very purpose of stimulus spending. It is no wonder that the Parliamentary Budget Officer has said, with respect to the government's so-called stimulus spending, that the government has “miscalibrated”.
With all of the spending, massive deficits and debt, where are Canadians as a result of the government's approach? Canada has among the slowest economic growth rates in the G7; one of the highest unemployment rates in the G7, a full 25% above the G7 average; and the highest level of debt, save for Japan. On top of that—