Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to be here with you today. I happen to rise one more time to talk about this important issue. I had an opportunity to get some questions in. It was nice to hear from the minister how much affection he has for me.
Perhaps I will save members the suspense. I can be persuaded to vote for this bill, not to fast track it all the way to the Senate, because maybe we have some amendments. As the member mentioned, there are a couple of ideas the government plagiarized from other parties in the House, both the Conservatives and, dare I say, even the NDP.
I have lots of questions and I want to focus on process for a minute. Typically, a government introduces significant money bills twice per year. It tables a budget in the spring, and then there are important measures included in a budget bill in the spring. Then it has a budget bill usually sometime in the late fall, and we typically pass it before everyone goes home for the winter break and Christmas holidays. Five ministers did a press conference last week at the national press gallery, where they all exclaimed that this bill is so important in order to address problems in the country. That is nice. They are finally waking up, but if these ideas were so amazingly brilliant and needed, why did the government omit them from the budget?
The government spends 12 months preparing a budget, and basically admitted a couple of months later that it did not get it all right and that it has a couple more ideas. Where did it get those ideas? It found out the leader of the official opposition was tabling a bill in the House to reduce the GST on purpose-built rentals, so the government rushed like heck to get a bill ready to do just that. Two bills were tabled before the House to get rid of the efficiencies defence, one by the NDP and one by the member for Bay of Quinte, a Conservative member. Last week, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry said about getting rid of the efficiencies defence that it is about time and we have to do it.
If the Liberals thought it was such an important idea, they could have fast-tracked any piece of legislation in June, before we left for the summer. What has changed? Why do they all of a sudden have these so-called solutions to problems that the government has not even been able to admit exist? The process matters because it highlights that this is a tired government that is out of ideas and is plagiarizing on its homework. It is now rushing and is likely to make mistakes by rushing and doing significant money bills on such short notice.
Frankly, with respect to the efficiencies defence, it was the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry who last year, in the last budget, introduced what he called sweeping changes to the Competition Act reform that had not been seen in at least a decade. If this were such an important change to make to the Competition Act, why did he not make the change last year? Why was he waiting until now?
I will tell members why he waited. It is because the leader of the NDP and a member from the Conservative Party made the suggestion. Liberals have actually run out of ideas, but we cannot blame them. It is human nature. How can we believe that we need solutions to problems when for months, members of the government were telling Canadians that no problems exist?
Let me read a few quotes, or let us go back to the tape as they say; we are now in football season.
The first quote states, “Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives continue to talk down the Canadian economy, but the reality is that Canada is the best country in the world...[when] coping...with the challenging global economic environment,” and says our economy grew faster than every other economy. It also says that the reality is that Canada is doing really well and inflation is way better here than it is elsewhere.
A Conservative member in the House stood up and asked the Minister of Finance what happens if inflation lasts just a little longer than we think and we hit a period of economic uncertainty. That question was asked in May 2022, and the answer from the Minister of Finance was, “I have to urge a bit of economic literacy among the members opposite. The reality is that in data released today, the Canadian economy grew by 3.1% on an annualized basis in the first quarter of this year.” This was an unwillingness to admit that there is trouble on the horizon. Now, last quarter, GDP contracted, and, guess what? Inflation is still around.
Now, we should not worry, because the government is here to solve the problems because it is just realizing that there is a problem and has all these solutions. However, they are not the government's solutions, they are solutions from others. Am I happy that the government took some ideas from opposition parties? Of course I am, but it goes to show that the government is actually just running out of ideas. The government told everybody that interest rates would remain low forever, and they have not. It said that because interest rates were low, it had to spend and that it would be unwise to not spend.
We are now going to spend as much in debt service costs this year as we send to provinces to deliver health care. It is only going to get worse for debt service costs, because when the budget was tabled, all economists, including the government's; the Governor of the Bank of Canada; and all the experts, said interest rates were going to go down by the end of the year. However, they have not; they have actually gone up, not down. That change is going to represent billions of dollars more in spending to service the debt, even just this year, but for at least the next five years as the government renegotiates, repapers and rolls over $421 billion of debt this year.
The reason the government has to roll over $421 billion is complete and utter negligence in the way it financed its COVID spending when COVID hit. The government told everyone that interest rates were going to remain low forever, and may have even believed it itself. When the government issued the debt, it issued only short-term debt. I cannot take credit for that. A very smart individual, Richard Dias, who is a well-known economist, showed that the government could have saved billions of dollars by issuing long bonds. However, the government chose to issue short-term bonds during the pandemic.
We cannot forget that Liberal tweet and the finance minister's starting the parade when in one month out of 28 months, inflation dropped below 3%. They said their job was done and government's plan to bring down inflation was working.
The Liberals really have not actually done that much. What they have ignored is the actual one thing, or maybe even two things, that would make a difference. One would be to reduce spending, and another would be that one does not have to be Einstein's cousin to realize that if taxes were reduced on the good that is causing inflation, it would reduce inflation. For some reason, that is pretty hard for the members on the other side of the chamber to figure out. However, Canadians are smarter than that. They know better than to trust a government to have solutions to the problems that it does not believe exist. I am glad that the Liberals are borrowing some ideas from the opposition parties.
I look forward to sending the bill to committee. I look forward to bringing some amendments, because I think the bill could actually be better. We could expand the GST rebate. Why are we not including triplexes, co-ops and duplexes? We could be driving more investment in this country, but the Liberals are determined to not have any other party in the chamber get a win.