Madam Speaker, I am pleased to say that I will be sharing my time with the terrific member of Parliament for Churchill—Keewatinook Aski. She will be doing the second half of our response to yet another Conservative opposition day.
For once, we are seeing the Conservatives not doing the same thing that they have done multiple times. We can talk about a waste of opposition days. Basically, numerous times over the course of the past year, they have put forward opposition days saying, “Let us make pollution free again.”
Today, the Conservatives have put forward a motion that calls on the government to do a number of things. They say they have learned lessons from the terrible carnage of the Harper years, the slash and burn we saw under the Conservatives for nearly a decade, a dismal decade in Canadian political life.
They say they have learned their lesson, and they reference a number of things. They are really concerned about the Canadian public and regular families this time. Yes, when they were in power, all they cared about was the ultrarich and billionaires, but they have learned a lesson from that, or at least that is what they are ultimately saying.
The Conservatives have put forward a number of very vague suggestions. I would like to talk about how that contrasts with how the Conservative Party acted during the dismal decade it was in power.
First of all, they decry deficits. You will recall, Madam Speaker, as you were in the House for many of these years, that the Harper government had record deficits. It had eight deficits in a row. Members of that government were horrible money managers.
We do not have to rely on my word or the word of the many Canadians who threw them out of office. We can also rely on the Department of Finance. It produces fiscal period returns. It compares government political parties, such as the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party and the NDP provincial governments. We have not yet formed a federal government, but the time is coming.
The fiscal period returns of the federal Minister of Finance actually show that the Conservatives are as bad as the Liberals when it comes to managing money. When it comes to putting in place the financial structure around federal government finances, the Conservatives are just as bad as the Liberals. The best party at managing money, and this comes from the fiscal period returns issued by the Department of Finance in Ottawa, are NDP governments. That is something we are proud of.
Tommy Douglas, our founding leader, was one who brought forward the proposition that one of the ways to ensure we adequately manage money is to ensure that the ultrarich pay their fair share. Obviously, the Harper government failed to do that, which is why we had eight consecutive years of deficits.
This motion, as far as Conservatives are concerned, is basically saying to the Canadian public, “Do not do as we do, but do as we say.” Their track record was absolutely lamentable. Why was the Harper government so bad at managing money? That brings me to my second point, where they talk about limiting expenditures.
The Harper government put in place, and it is true that the Liberal government that preceded it started to lay the foundation, but the Harper government really put into place that intricate network of overseas tax havens, which today cost Canadians over $30 billion a year.
The member for Carleton is the current leader of the Conservative Party. It has changed leaders a lot in the last few years, so we will see how long he lasts. The member for Carleton was part of the finance committee that studied the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report that talked about that $30-billion figure.
In fact, the PBO said that is a conservative figure. It may be far beyond that. The Harper government signed tax treaties with alacrity and with any tax haven that wanted to step up. The Conservatives were there making sure that the rich and the billionaires had a place to put their money, and that they never had to pay their fair share of taxes.
This is linked because Conservative financial management really is an oxymoron. It links the fact that we had deficits to the fact that it allowed the widespread, indiscriminate taking of money overseas so the wealthy in Canada never had to pay their fair share.
This is simply bad financial management. That is why the Conservatives have a track record just as dismal as the Liberals in putting in place measures that ensure investments in the country, investments from the federal government that go to those who need it the most, and that is to Canadians who are struggling to make ends meet.
As an aside, it is kind of rich that at one point in this very long motion, which really does not talk about anything specific in terms of action, the Conservatives do mention that housing costs have doubled under the Liberal government. That is indeed true, but they forget to mention, and maybe it is in the fine print or in a footnote, that housing prices doubled under them as well, Therefore, they are half the problem. The Conservatives doubled housing prices and the Liberals have doubled them again.
What we need is an NDP government that can ensure there is affordable housing for Canadians so they can have a roof over their head at night.
What did the Conservatives do in this appallingly bad period, the dismal decade of awful financial management?
It is interesting that we hear the Conservatives piping up. I am not sure what they are saying, but I am sure they will have time during the question period.
What they did with these eight-time deficits—