Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to rise in the House today and speak to the government's budget. I have been spending a lot of time talking to people in my constituency about where they think this country should go coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. What does the future look like? What are the things we need to be focusing on as we move forward as a country?
There are three big priorities that I am hearing from my constituents in terms of their concerns of the direction of the government. Their concerns are around rising government debt. Their concerns are around the failure to support the energy sector and the role that the energy sector will play in our economy going forward. The third concern I hear a great deal about in my riding right now is freedom of speech and attacks on freedom of speech that we hear from the government.
With respect to Bill C-30, the government's budget bill, let us zero in on the first of those two points: government debt and the energy sector. As we come out of the COVID-19 pandemic, people are looking to see what kinds of plans are in place to allow our economy to grow and prosper and be firing on all cylinders again. In order to do, that we need strong public finances. In order to do, that we need to have support for our key natural resource and other sectors that really drive prosperity.
We have to have sound public finance and we have to have revenue coming in to government coffers as a result of jobs being created, opportunities being created in our key sectors. There is a great deal of concern about the public debt that has been run up over the course of this pandemic, but it did not start with the pandemic. Let us remember, when the Prime Minister took office, we had a balanced budget. Canada had been through the global financial crisis. We ran deficits during those years, but Canada was back in a balanced budget position in 2015.
In fact, over the course of the tenure of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada's debt-to-GDP ratio had gone down. We had been through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Over the course of the tenure of that prime minister, through those incredibly difficult circumstances, the debt-to-GDP ratio had gone down.
We had a prime minister coming in and saying, “the good times will last forever, do not worry about it, the budget will balance itself, so we can run modest deficits”. Recall that 2015 election campaign, three $10-billion deficits followed by a balanced budget in year four: that was the promise made by the Prime Minister. Teeny, tiny deficits, $10-billion deficits for three years followed by a balanced budget.
What happened? In the first year under finance minister Bill Morneau, the government had a deficit that essentially ate up its promised deficit allotment for the three years all in one year. The Prime Minister had not foreseen perhaps, or maybe he did and just did not tell us, that when opening the floodgates with money for everything, money for this and money for that and we do not have to worry about raising the revenue for it, that can become a bottomless pit. We have seen over time this bottomless pit of willingness to go into debt get deeper and deeper. Instead of three years of $10-billion deficits and then a balanced budget, we had four years in the order of about $30-billion deficits. During relatively good years, the government ran up another $100 billion worth of debt.
Part of the reason we need to have strong public finances is to preserve that capacity during challenging circumstances to run deficits. In the midst of a global financial crisis as we faced in 2008-09, in the face of the pandemic as we dealt with in this Parliament, it is very often necessary to have some degree of deficit spending. However, if we are running deficits already prior to that period and then go further into deficit, we increase our risk of a long-term debt crisis. Certainly we run up massive amounts of more debt that have to be paid off at some point.
The government's long-term fiscal plan coming out of this pandemic involves very large deficits in perpetuity. There is no plan for us to ever get back at any point, even to the $10-billion figure that the Liberals talked about when they ran in 2015. The long-term plan is to spend more that we have every single year.
We have different parties in the House with different approaches to spending. Conservatives believe that it is important for us to move toward a balanced budget—