Madam Speaker, I rise this morning to speak to Bill C-8, which would enact tax and spending measures outlined in the government's fiscal and economic update introduced in December.
The Liberal government has now been in office for more than six years. Six years in, we have an inflation crisis, an affordability crisis and a supply chain crisis. The government has presided over massive deficits and massive debt. They are historical levels of debt. In two short years, the government has managed to double the national debt to a staggering $1.4 trillion. Forty per cent of Canadians are living paycheque to paycheque, $200 away from insolvency. These same hard-working everyday Canadians are being hit hard by the Liberal government. They are being hit hard in terms of their spending power being diminished as a result of 30-year-high inflation, and they are being hit hard with Liberal tax hikes, including carbon tax and CPP tax hikes. After six years, that is the sad state of affairs in this country under the failed policies and failed leadership of this failed Prime Minister.
What has Bill C-8 done to address these significant challenges? In short, it has done very little. Instead, it does what the government only knows how to do, and that is to spend and spend some more. Bill C-8 would provide a fire hose of $71 billion in new spending. That is on top of the nearly $600 billion of spending over the last two years, a third of which was completely unrelated to COVID as determined by the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
How much is $71 billion? To put it in some context, it is about 40% more than the government provides to provinces in health care spending by way of the Canada health transfer. It is double what the government collects annually in GST. In short, $71 billion is a staggering amount of new spending and new debt, and for what purpose?
The Parliamentary Budget Officer does not think this fire hose of new spending is a good idea. Indeed, he recently stated:
It appears to me that the rationale for the additional spending initially set aside as ‘stimulus’ no longer exists.
The rationale no longer exists. All this will do is pour gasoline on the fire that is inflation, making life even less affordable for everyday Canadians.
Among the measures of new spending provided for in Bill C-8 is $300 million over the next three years to fund the Liberal government's vaccine mandates. Less than a year ago, the Prime Minister ruled out the imposition of such mandates. He then flip-flopped on that commitment, and when he imposed the mandates, they were understood to be temporary. We have now learned that they are not temporary, and that the government intends to make them permanent.
This is alarming. These vaccine mandates have done nothing to keep Canadians safe. What they have done is destroy lives and livelihoods. Hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying Canadians have lost their jobs and lost benefits they paid into their entire working lives. These same Canadians have had their mobility rights infringed upon. They are unable to get on airplanes or trains, which inhibits their ability to travel freely within Canada, never mind leave the country.
This is in a free and democratic country. If one would have described what the government is doing to fellow Canadians in Canada two short years ago, no one would have believed them, but here we are today. These mandates infringe upon the medical privacy rights of Canadians, and they infringe upon the ability of Canadians to make individual health decisions free of state coercion. These mandates without more are punitive, discriminatory and un-Canadian, and they could not be more ill-timed because in much of the rest of the world, governments are moving in the opposite direction. The U.K. has lifted all restrictions. Most EU countries have lifted all or most restrictions. The majority of U.S. states have lifted all restrictions, many of which did so some time ago. Saskatchewan has announced it is lifting restrictions. Alberta is about to follow suit, but not this government under this Prime Minister.
Instead, he is doubling down with new permanent mandates, and he is expanding mandates to the transportation sector that will do nothing more, and are doing nothing more, than to exacerbate the serious supply chain issues that we face. For the Prime Minister, it is not about science. It is not about data. It is not about keeping Canadians safe. What it is about is dividing Canadians for short-term political gain and using COVID as a pretext to vastly expand the size, scope and control of government.
It does not have to be this way. In much of the rest of the world, it is not this way, and on this side of the House, we are going to do everything to ensure that it does not remain this way so that Canadians can once again take control of their lives against this massive state overreach.