Debates of June 7th, 2023

Budget Implementation Act, 2023, No. 1

[Marty Morantz, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Madam Speaker, there is one aspect of the budget on which I want to get clarification.

In the fall economic statement, in the 2027-28 business year, the fall economic statement projected a $4.5-billion surplus. Only 140 days later, on March 28, the budget introduced a table for the same year that showed a $14-billion deficit, an $18.5-billion swing.

I wonder if the member could give us some details as to why there was the change.

[Rachel Bendayan, Liberal, Outremont, QC]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate my colleague opposite. I know him to be a learned member of the House.

The simple fact is that a majority of Conservative Party members voted against climate action in the House. We know that the global environment has changed. There are challenges at the moment, but what the Conservatives are proposing are simply cuts.

What the Conservatives are proposing are austerity measures, and as I mentioned in the speech—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

The hon. member for Edmonton—Wetaskiwin is rising on a point of order.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

Madam Speaker, I believe the rules of the House dictate that when a question is asked, the hon. member answering the question should at least attempt to refer, in some way, to—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

This is a point of debate.

The hon. parliamentary secretary.

[Rachel Bendayan, Liberal, Outremont, QC]

Madam Speaker, I find it ironic that the Conservatives are talking about answering questions.

Several times, we have asked the Conservatives what they are proposing by way of economic policy or what they are proposing by way of climate policy, and the answer has been silence. It has been silence on the other side. They have no plan for the economy. They have no plan for our planet. They have no plan for our future.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Madam Speaker, I will be very brief.

This whole charade is impressive. Everything that has happened since Friday has been things I did not want to see or hear, and I can say that because the Bloc is not looking to form government. It has been about partisanship, foreign interference, climate change and forest fires come early. However, when I go back to my riding, I see that seniors are being abandoned.

Come on, what is going on? It is going to be a real show here tonight, right up until midnight.

I want to talk about seniors exclusively. I want my colleague to explain why they were abandoned.

[Rachel Bendayan, Liberal, Outremont, QC]

Madam Speaker, I also deplore what is happening in the House. I would have liked to have a debate on the issues, including how we could help our seniors.

We have already done a lot to support our seniors. We have increased old age security. There are other policies we could put in place, but we spend our time dealing with the Conservatives' partisan games, which is unfortunate.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Leader of the Opposition]

Madam Speaker, I am rising today to speak, and to speak and to speak, for the people who have no voice, the people who have been silenced for too long, the quiet ones, the ones who toil away to pay their bills but have no means to pay any longer.

They are the ones who cannot hire lobbyists to make their voices heard in the halls of power and they have no connections to get their concerns into the headlines of the newspapers, but they are the quiet ones who do the nation's work, who carry the country on their back. They are the ones who rise when it is still dark and work until it is dark again, but lately, for them, it has felt like nothing but darkness.

In this period of difficulty, everything feels broken, and the government is broke. These are the people who skip meals because they cannot afford the price of food. These are the people who quietly go to food banks because they know it is the only way they will have a chance to feed their children. These are the 33-year-old men and women who did everything we asked them to do, worked hard, paid off their bills, had a job or two or three right through university, and yet still cannot afford a home and have calculated that they will never be able to afford a home, because prices are too high and rates are too burdensome for them ever to do so.

When the Prime Minister rose today to complain that I would be on my feet for hours and hours at a time to block his latest assault on the paycheques of these quiet, patriotic working people, let me inform him that I was not deterred. I will speak for those people who cannot speak for themselves because they are too busy carrying the nation on their backs.

I am rising in the House today to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves because they are carrying the weight of the nation on their backs. I am speaking on behalf of single mothers who are skipping meals because that is the only way they can afford to buy groceries for their children.

I am rising in the House today to speak on behalf of truckers who work seven days a week and do not even see their children anymore because that is what it takes for them to pay the bills. I am rising for the nine out of 10 Canadians who say that they will never be able to afford a house after eight years under this Prime Minister.

I am rising in the House to speak for taxpayers who cannot afford to pay the carbon tax that the government wants to increase to 61¢ a litre. I am speaking for all those who cannot afford to pay any more and who need a voice in the House of Commons, who need us to take action so that they can earn a decent living, have a home and have financial security, which security is threatened day after day because of this inflationary deficit budget.

We will work and fight to prevent this budget from being passed.

In order to understand where we go from here, we have to understand how we arrived here in the first place. To understand the future, we have to understand the past. To know tomorrow, we have to know yesterday. This is not a unique concept. In fact, I learned it from the great Winston Churchill.

Winston Churchill was probably the most prescient statesman of the 20th century. We know that he predicted the ravages of the evil Hitlerian regime in the early 1930s, before many of his own countrymen had realized the risk that was gathering. In a 1931 essay that he wrote in Maclean's magazine, “Fifty Years Hence”, he predicted the iPad, which he described as a device that one would hold in one's hand and use to talk to a friend on the other side of the world as though they were just sticking their head out the window to talk to a neighbour.

He predicted that we would have wireless modems in houses. He used other words to describe them, but he described them with incredible precision. He described the fierce power of the atom. He even wrote back then, at the beginning of the 1930s, about how we would one day unlock the force of hydrogen as a fuel source, which is something that the government is celebrating as being a completely new concept, almost a century later.

He said, at Westminster College in Missouri, that an iron curtain was descending across Europe, and at that moment described what would become known as the Cold War before anyone else was able to predict such a thing.

How was he able to see so far into the future? Of course, he was able to because he had been so capable of seeing into the past.

I see there has been an improvement on the government side, by the way. It is a big improvement, if only the cameras could see the very impressive people sitting there.

He predicted all of these matters into the future because he had so completely understood the past. He wrote 58 volumes of Nobel prize-winning literature, almost all of it historical in nature. Because he understood history, he could tell where the future was going. He understood that our imagination is really just fragments of memory put together and that we can have no imagination of what is to come without those fragments from the past, and that is how he was able to see forward.

Today I will use the methodology that he gave in kind of an IKEA instruction manual on how to tell the future. It would be like a pocketbook for every fortune teller.

What he said is that there are two ways you can predict the future. One is to look at where you are and where you were, and you can project to where you will be. It is obvious that this method is based on trajectory. The second way is that there is something called the “cycle of history”: The things that have gone around and around again will come around and around in the future. I am going to use both of these methods to foretell where we are headed and, unfortunately, to deliver some dark warnings about the perils that accumulate in front of our eyes if we do not change course and do so very quickly.

Let us start with where we were, where we are and where we are headed.

I start by pointing out that only eight years ago, the average cost for a house in Canada was $450,000. The average mortgage payment was a mere $1,300 or $1,400. The average rent was $900. Unfortunately, because the government has unleashed a torrent of government spending, it has doubled the national debt, increased the size and cost of government and delivered to us 40-year high inflation, all of which have doubled housing prices, doubled rent, doubled monthly mortgage payments and doubled the necessary down payment needed to buy a home. How did we get here?

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I know that the members across the way would like to continue to talk me down and to silence my voice because they do not want—

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

Order. Order.

I seem to have one of the official opposition members heckling him as well.

I would ask members to please not interrupt. I want to remind members that while someone has the floor, it is not very respectful for others to be speaking. If they wish to have conversations, they should take them outside and allow the hon. member to have the floor to be able to do his speech, because I know they will have questions and comments.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. It is not respectful to leave no one in the room on the government side when the Leader of the Opposition—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

There are individuals in the room, and that is not a point of order at this point. I do not think that the hon. member could even call for quorum. There is quorum, so I will recognize the hon. leader of the official opposition.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

It is still happening. I think we can have it quiet as a mouse. Is that possible?

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

Order. If hon. members want their own members to speak, I think they should be quiet.

The hon. member for Timmins—James Bay.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, I have been in the House many years and I have always enjoyed the leader of Stornoway's stunts.

Are we actually saying that there is going to be historical precedence and they are upset that nobody bothers to listen to him? Is that literally a point—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

That is not a point of order; it is a point of debate.

The hon. leader of the official opposition.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, it was good to hear from the hon. member for Timmins—James Bay. He does make a lot of noise, but that is because an empty wagon rattles the loudest. The people of Timmins keep telling me, as I have been there four times in a year, that they have seen more of me in the last year than they have seen of him in the last decade, and they are happy about that.

Over the last eight years, we have seen a massive, possibly unprecedented, mounting of both public and private debt. We have to understand where we were and where we are in order to understand where we are going. In the last four years, the government has doubled our national debt. That is more than half a trillion dollars of new debt. The Prime Minister has added more debt than all previous prime ministers combined.

He will be quick to point to many different excuses that have caused this run-up in our national debt. I will point out that while there was a COVID pandemic, this is not the first crisis we have ever seen in the history of the world. While there has been a war between Russia and Ukraine, this is not the first war ever fought in the history of the world.

We had the great global recession under the previous Conservative government. We had two wars: one in Afghanistan, and another in Iraq and Syria. We managed to do so while keeping the debt the lowest in the G7 and balancing the budget. Other countries faced similar challenges without adding as much debt.

For example, the Swiss, who are right in the centre of Europe, closer to the conflict in Ukraine, and more dependent on global supply chains than we are because they are a landlocked nation surrounded by the European Union, were able to balance their budget, pay down their deficit, pay down their debt and keep interest rates, inflation and unemployment lower than all of the other OECD countries. That proves that just because there is a pandemic or a war in one part of the world, it does not force a government to completely bankrupt itself.

Let us recall that the Prime Minister added $100 billion of debt before there was a single case of COVID. He has added roughly $100 billion since COVID came to an end. During the COVID pandemic, 40%, or $200 billion of the new debt that he added, had nothing to do with COVID whatsoever according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. The idea that we can blame all of this new debt on factors out of his control is provably false.

The Prime Minister had a choice and his decision was to spend without any thought for future generations or for the financial viability of the country. In order to enable his spending, he unleashed nearly unprecedented printing of cash. This was done through something called quantitative easing where the central bank purchased government debt at exceptionally high prices, driving down yields on that debt, and ultimately pumping $400 billion of new cash into the economy in less than two years.

Many will say the Liberals had no choice. There was a pandemic after all. Let us review that excuse. The pandemic did not bring a liquidity crunch. In fact, the economic phenomenon of the pandemic was that people had more cash than ever before, but they were banned from spending it. The problem was not the lack of cash, as had been the case in the previous great global recession.

The problem was that people and businesses had bank accounts that were overflowing with cash with nowhere they were allowed to spend it. In that kind of environment, the worst possible thing one could do is to print more cash and further overflow bank accounts with that money, which, in the end, we knew would ultimately have led to inflation.

During that run-up of the size of our monetary base that kept money printing, the Minister of Finance, always looking for the trendiest new slogan that would win her applause in Davos or Brussels or at some other international symposium, said that all this cash that was filling up bank accounts was like a “pre-loaded stimulus”, something that could be unleashed to revive a dead economy. Of course the economy was only dead because governments had shut it down, not because there was a lack of cash with which to facilitate commerce. When the economy opened, all of that excess cash was unleashed, and the goods we buy and the interest we pay were automatically and predictably bid up.

We do not fault the government for having created programs to pay people's bills while governments locked them down and prevented them from paying their own. Where we did object was with the government giving out $2,000-a-month payments to prisoners, to dead people, to teenagers who did not have that kind of money before the crisis occurred, and in many cases had no jobs at all.

We objected to the government continuing to pay out these benefits well after there were more than a million vacant jobs. In other words, we were paying people not to work while there were a million vacant jobs they could have been filling. Simultaneously driving up unemployment and job vacancies, an unusual coincidence of achievement or, in reality, negative achievement in the use of this policy.

The reality is that we warned the Liberals at the time that if they did not restrain themselves this would lead to a crisis. It would start with inflation and be followed up by an interest rate increase. This was not based on some invention—

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary Forest Lawn, AB]

Madam Speaker, I have a point of order. The members on the other side are speaking even louder than he is. I would ask that they show us—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

I do want to remind members, if they want to have conversations, to please take them out to allow the speaker to be heard, so that MPs could be ready for questions and comments.

The hon. Leader of the Opposition.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I know that the Liberals across the way would love to silence my voice. They want to silence Canadians by censoring the Internet. They want to bring their woke censorship ideology to university campuses—