Debates of April 29th, 2024

Financial Statement of Minister of Finance

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

Madam Speaker, like my hon. colleague, I also enjoy working with her on the veterans committee. She contributes a lot and pushes veterans advocacy to great heights, specifically for the plight of female veterans. When it comes to this issue, it is an ongoing issue. It needs to be worked out. I think the commitment of our government stands and we will continue to do that.

I believe similar implications arise for the pensions of members of Parliament as well, where if they get married after 60, it does not apply to their spouses. These are things that, as times have changed, we need to amend, and I think the Minister of Veterans Affairs will be looking at it accordingly.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

Uqaqtittiji, the member talked much about fairness and housing. Unfortunately, the budget does not do enough for first nations housing. The AFN said there needs to be $44 billion to close the gap. This budget promises only $918 million over five years.

How can the member say this is fair to first nations, when they are getting meagre pennies out of the budget?

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

Madam Speaker, I respect the hon. member of Parliament on this issue. I think housing for indigenous folks, the Inuit, first nations and Métis populations in this country, is a paramount responsibility of the federal government. A lot of neglect has happened in the past, and therefore a lot of repair and upgrading has to be done.

A billion dollars is not an insignificant amount. If we look at it from the perspective of $15 billion, it is almost 7% or 8%. I think more has to be done, and we will continue to work to make sure all indigenous people have the right type of housing they need.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Revenue]

Madam Speaker, I have been a member of Parliament for almost nine years now, and the number one thing I try to do is listen to what my constituents want in terms of how we operate here in this House and the resources that we are able to provide to them to make sure they are able to thrive and succeed in everything they want to accomplish.

Over these past eight-plus years that I have been a member of Parliament, in all the budgets we have been able to deliver to Canadians to deal with what was a phenomenon across the whole world, the coronavirus and COVID-19, we were able to provide support to Canadians. Now that we are trying to recover from that time, I think budget 2024 really does make sure that we are looking out for every single generation that has been impacted over these past number of years, with all the challenges we have been faced with.

I talk to my constituents, and in fact, earlier this week, I was at my local high school for an announcement, where we talked about the national school food program. We learned how many kids are going to school hungry. I personally watched, as part of delivering the food program, how many kids put an apple in their pocket for later. I now understand and appreciate what food insecurity means. It is something that our government has really tried to tackle in this budget with the national school food program. It will have a significant impact in building our next generation of Canadians who are going to take the helm, fight climate change, make sure that the economy is where it needs to be and make sure that Canada is a successful nation, not just internally but internationally as well. This is a good program for us to invest in.

When I talk to seniors about the New Horizons program, for example, I see the local impact of our government providing supports to seniors who are going through isolation, health issues and so many other challenges internally, giving them support to enable them to thrive. That is what our government stands for.

When we talk about the disability benefit, it is about creating a foundation of what a disability benefit is going to look like over the next number of years for those who really need the help and support from our government that we can deliver. The question is, are we going to be able to deliver it? I challenge every single member in this House to say that it is our brand as Canadians and who we are to support one another. Whether it is about the disability benefit, or whether it is about ensuring that seniors have the support they need through the New Horizons program or the dental care program, are we providing support to Canadians when they need it the most? It is not about supporting people who have support already. It is about providing a foundation to those who need it the most, so they can give themselves a boost up and take care of themselves. That is literally what our Liberal government has been all about. It is about providing support to people who need it at the time they need it.

When we went through the COVID-19 pandemic, what did Canadians expect from us? As they were told by their provincial governments that they had to stay at home, that they could not interact with friends and family, that they could not go to work, it was our government, the federal Liberal government, that really put in the effort to make sure that we were delivering CERB to everyone, that people had the ability to put food on the table, that they were able to pay their rent through our rental subsidy program and that they were able to run their small businesses through our CEBA program. That is really what the role of a government is all about. It is about making sure that Canadians have the support they need.

When we talk about fighting climate change, it is all of Canada coming together and making sure that we are all pitching in a little bit, but through the carbon rebate program, Canadians are actually getting more into their pockets than they would without having to pay into this program.

When we are talking about building housing for every single person in my riding of Mississauga—Erin Mills, for people in the region of Peel and indeed across Canada, we are talking about ensuring that our millennials, our gen Z Canadians, or whatever name we want to call it, are able to have secure housing that they can afford. In my region, we have been able to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure that Canadians have the ability to afford housing within our region.

When we talk about ensuring the safety of Canadians, we have put in investments to make sure that auto thefts are taken care of, and we are doing our level best to make sure that auto theft is curbed within our communities. We are also talking about gender-based violence to make sure that women and gendered communities within the communities that we all serve, that we all represent, are going to be safe and have the security to be able to live healthy and safe lives.

We are trying our level best to ensure that Canadians have the supports they need, and budget 2024 is a great reflection of that. It is reflective of the young people who are trying to buy homes, trying to look for jobs and trying to ensure that their careers are secure. It is a great support for those who are raising young families, to ensure that our young people are secure, as well as for our seniors, whether it is through the dental program or ensuring that GIS and old age security are there for everyone. We are really doing our level best, as the Liberal government, to ensure that everybody in our country has the best to be able to boost themselves up.

A lot of people say that it is not the responsibility of the federal government to make sure that every household is taken care of. However, I believe that it is the responsibility of our government to ensure that we give everybody the leg-up they need to be able to thrive and to live with respect, dignity and prosperity within our communities. That is how we build a better Canada, and budget 2024 is the way to do that.

[Eric Melillo, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

Madam Speaker, the member opposite spoke a lot about the cost of food. One thing that the Conservatives wanted to see ahead of the budget was a plan to immediately pass Bill C-234 in its original form, which would support farmers and farm families by taking the carbon tax off food and making it a lot more affordable for everyone to buy groceries.

Can the member speak to why the government has been dragging its feet to do that? It is a very simple action that could make groceries more affordable for every Canadian across the country.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Madam Speaker, I would really appreciate it if the members opposite would work with a team Canada approach to do a lot of the things we all want to do. It is the Conservatives who are actually dragging their feet on this. We are trying to ensure that Canada has food security, whether it is through our grocery rebate or through our carbon rebate, so that Canadians have the support they need in their lives on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, we have seen time and time again that our Conservative colleagues have voted against this. In fact, they are gaslighting our country as to how that support is to be delivered. I would appreciate it if they would come to the table to make sure that we are continuing to work on a team Canada approach and ensuring that Canadians are well taken care of.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for her intervention.

What we have here is a budget that is full of interference and inefficiency. That is what happens when, for example, the government encroaches on areas under the jurisdiction of the provinces and Quebec and subcontracts projects to private companies. ArriveCAN recently showed us what happens when projects are subcontracted to private companies. The same thing is going to happen. It is just going to make things more inefficient.

I know that my colleague is going to say that she supports the government and its budget. However, is she not bothered by the fact that this is going to create inefficiency and waste public money, all to benefit private companies?

There is a very simple and easy initiative the government could launch at the same time. It could increase old age security starting at age 65. We have been asking for this for years, but the government stubbornly refuses to do it.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his question. I am practising my French a bit.

I will continue to practise.

However, the thing is that we have to work with private companies and to make sure that these partnerships exist. We have to make sure that we are building a community that is effective for our private industries and for research and development, as well as for our social causes so that those who need the support are able to get it. Without the support of the private sector, we are not able to do that. The government is not in the business of making money; it is in the business of providing support and a leg up to those who need it the most. If we are able to build those partnerships with private entities and with industry to ask how we can provide support to Canadians better, then I think we should do it.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Madam Speaker, certainly there are things in the budget that we support and that we worked hard to deliver. However, there is a lot of concern and dismay around the Canada disability benefit.

I heard the parliamentary secretary describe it as a foundation earlier. The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance described it as a first step. That was never the way it was conceived. The first step, the foundation, was the legislation. People were expecting a viable disability benefit that would actually lift people out of poverty, yet what we see is something that amounts to $200 a month, or $6 a day. I think the disappointment and dismay that we are hearing from the disability community is evidence that it is inadequate.

How many steps are there in the government's incremental, multistep approach to lifting people out of poverty, and how long are people with disabilities going to have to wait?

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Madam Speaker, as members know, politicians rarely have very brief answers, but on this issue, I take the criticism. I understand and appreciate how important it is for us to support the disability community. As I said in my speech, this is a foundation for us to really build upon, and we will continue to build upon it based on the feedback we get from the community. I hope that this really flourishes into something that we can work with provinces and territories on to ensure that—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

We have to ensure the debate can continue.

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Calgary Rocky Ridge has the floor.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Madam Speaker, it is another year and another broken 2015 election promise. Let no Canadian or anyone on those benches who ran in 2015 forget what the current government promised. In 2015, the Liberals promised that more spending, more taxes, more deficits and more borrowing would lead to a magical utopia where budgets would balance themselves. They promised they would take a balanced budget that they inherited from the Conservative government and turn it into a deficit, but Canadians were not to worry: It would be a small, short-term deficit.

The Liberals ran on a commitment in 2015 that they took door to door to Canadians, telling them they would run deficits to fund unprecedented national infrastructure spending. Within three years the budget would balance itself. Here we are nine years later, and everything in that promise they made and were elected on turned out to be false. They broke that promise in the very first budget they tabled. For nine fiscal years in a row, the government has promised more spending, more borrowing, more taxes, more deficits, more interest payments, more inflation and more debts amid a further deterioration of the national balance sheet and declining living standards that are hollowing out the middle class. The government has broken the main election promise it made to Canadians in 2015. It promised it would not do that. It promised that a limited deficit would be it and that the budget would then balance itself.

However, budget 2016 was almost Orwellian in the way it pretended that the promises the Liberals made in the previous year had never happened. In 2017, they brought in what some called the “Seinfeld” budget, a budget about nothing, just more of the same. In 2018, I called it the “Britney Spears” budget: oops!... I did it again. In 2019, they promised the debt-to-GDP ratio would shrink forever.

In early 2020, the country was on the brink of a recession, the credit rating had been downgraded by Fitch and the debt-to-GDP ratio was rising. This was all before the pandemic. The government had already squandered its fiscal inheritance and abandoned its promises and so-called fiscal anchors and guardrails.

After the pandemic, the Liberals tabled the “pants on fire” budget, which continued to ignore every fiscal promise and projection they have made in successive election campaigns, previous budgets and fall economic statements.

Budget 2024 says, “we can make sure that Canadians at every age can find an affordable home.” However, the 2015 Liberal platform said the same thing: “We will make it easier for Canadians to find an affordable place to call home.”

The government is repeating old, broken promises verbatim, never mind that housing prices have doubled in that time and rents in some cities have nearly tripled in the nine years since it made those identical promises. Just how much credibility does it think it deserves for anything that it claims in its various announcements?

After nine years, we have unaffordable rents, home ownership no longer an attainable middle-class ambition, record food bank use and another budget that promises more of the same pattern of out-of-control spending and new tax increases. Let us call this one the “Hall and Oates” budget, because it is obvious to Canadians that the government is out of touch and Canadians are out of time.

It is not just with respect to fiscal mismanagement; the government has lost control of the institutional machinery of government. It is a government that has presided over a record expansion of the bureaucracy and an exponential expansion of the use of private consultants. Despite this record bloat, access to government services has never been worse.

The immigration decision queue is 2.5 million people long. The CRA call centres continue to give false information to Canadians or are unavailable when they need them. Most distressingly, the Canadian Armed Forces are in a “death spiral” crisis of retention and recruitment. Those are not my words, but the words of the minister himself.

For nine years, the government has pursued an anti-energy, anti-industry, anti-jobs policy that has resulted in Canadians dropping to near the bottom of peer countries in productivity. This is driving down the standard of living for Canadians at a time when they desperately need economic leadership in order to sustain program expenditures and our national security and public safety.

Conservatives do not want to fix the budget simply because we like the look of a nice tidy financial statement. The budgetary madness of the NDP-Liberal government threatens the prosperity of ordinary Canadians, the sustainability of programs that vulnerable Canadians rely on, Canada's national security, and Canada's ability to be a trusted and meaningful ally in global affairs. This then threatens our trade relationships, our diplomacy and our national security.

The budget has the same formula that has seen the gap in the standard of living between Canadians and Americans widen rapidly. That is not my opinion; it is what economists and the government's own reports are saying. Statistics Canada said, “Real GDP per capita has now declined in five of the past six quarters and is currently near levels observed in 2017.” This past January, Jack Mintz said, “real GDP per capita has stalled since 2018, fell in 2023 by 2.4 per cent and will likely fall again this year.”

According to the Royal Bank, “The Canadian economy is sharply underperforming global peers.... Since 2019, Canadian gross domestic product per capita has declined 2.8% versus a 7% increase in the U.S.” The bank notes that this is the single largest underperformance of the Canadian economy in comparison to the United States since 1965, almost 60 years ago. We should let that sink in: Per capita GDP is now lower than it was five years ago, while in peer countries, it is higher. We have Canada's worst underperformance in comparison to the U.S. economy in that time.

The OECD expects that Canada will record the worst economic growth among advanced countries for decades to come. The C.D. Howe Institute says:

Comparing investment in Canada to that in the United States and other OECD countries reveals that, before 2015, Canadian businesses had been closing a long-standing gap between investment per available worker in Canada and abroad. Since 2015, however the gap has become a chasm.... Having investment per worker much lower in Canada than [in other countries] tells us that businesses see less opportunity in Canada, and prefigures weaker growth in Canadian earnings and living standards than in other OECD countries.

To put it another way, the government is chasing business investment out of Canada, and the result is a lower standard of living for Canadians. The budget itself reveals that interest on the national debt is now more than the entire Canada health transfer. It is also way more than the entire national defence budget. Taxes from Canadians are increasingly going to pay Canada's creditors instead of paying for health care and defence.

Nine years of budgets that spend, borrow and tax more than they promised in their election platforms are making Canadians poorer, and they know it. Canadians know that they cannot afford rent, home heating, gasoline and mortgage payments. They know that inflation is ruining the purchasing power of their wages and the value of their savings. They know that, as government piles on more debt from more spending, they are going to be the ones who will have to pay for it all. They know it is not going to be the ultrawealthy who will just cheerfully pay a little more because it is only fair. Canadians know it is going to be the workers, seniors, small business owners and especially the young who will end up paying for the intergenerational theft that is contained in this budget.

That is why Canadians are increasingly ready for a government that would axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. That is why I will vote against the budget. I will vote non-confidence in the government. The Liberal government is out of touch. Canadians are out of time. Let us have an election and bring in a Conservative government to clean up this mess.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, I listened to the member talk about energy in this country, and I hear Conservatives talk in this way all the time. I just want to understand what he means.

Conservatives always say that the government is anti-energy, but, in reality, we are in favour of looking at various different forms of energy. Conservatives talk about energy as though the only possible form involves fossil fuels.

Can the member explain to the House why Conservatives do not regard renewables and other cleaner forms of energy as “energy”? If they did, they would not use this anti-energy narrative.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Madam Speaker, we said no such thing. We are pro-energy, all kinds of energy. I did not differentiate between different forms of energy.

I will say that the government is explicitly anti-fossil fuels, to the extent that it refuses to allow Canadians to develop, export and provide LNG, for example, to the world. Just recently, countries like Greece, Poland and Germany have been begging and crying out for Canadian LNG as both a transition fuel and as an alternative to Putin's energy products, which fund his murderous war on Ukraine.

[Luc Desilets, Bloc, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

Madam Speaker, since this morning, the Conservatives have been presenting worst-case scenarios involving the budget. They are taking a bulldozer approach, but that is not the Bloc's style. We try to be somewhat constructive and see the positive points. We try to help, be accommodating and improve what is presented to us. That is our approach. We are obviously going to vote against the budget, but not for the same reasons.

I would like to ask my colleague if he can find just two or three small items in the budget that he agrees with.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Madam Speaker, the approach of the government is hollowing out the Canadian economy and the Canadian middle class. I see no reason to support it whatsoever. We need an immediate election.

I am glad the hon. member and his party have finally decided to stop propping up the government. We will see what the NDP does.

I am ready to go next week. Let us have an election.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Madam Speaker, I know my colleague is going to oppose this budget, but maybe he would like to be a little specific about some of the reasons why this is such a challenging budget for small businesses.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Madam Speaker, as I said, we all know who is going to end up having to pay for the ongoing debt, the ongoing borrowing, which is starting to choke out the rest of the budget. We can see how interest payments are now choking out other expenditures. It is going to be the young, it is going to be seniors, it is going to be workers and it is going to be small businesses that end up paying the price for the government.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, I have often made reference to the Conservative Party and its leader being on the far right. I know that upsets the member across the way, but that is the truth.

Could the member reflect on the leader of the Conservative Party and his flirtation with Diagolon, which is an extreme right group that preaches hatred and who knows what else? It is a far-right group. That is the driving force being enabled by the his leader, the leader of the Conservative Party. I would be interested in his comments on that.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Madam Speaker, that member has nothing so he just blathers nonsense. We are debating a budget. That member is obviously not prepared to debate my speech or to offer a question or a comment on the speech or the matter at hand.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Madam Speaker, what is the legacy of the current Liberal Prime Minister? Sadly, his entire legacy amounts to one thing. The Prime Minister has grown the national debt more in nine years than under every other prime minister in Canadian history before him combined. That is his legacy. That is the end of it. That is the only thing that he stands for and has as a legacy. That debt now stands at $1.3 trillion, which is an enormous number. It is actually hard to comprehend or even imagine for just about any Canadian. It is really hard to visualize how much money we are even talking about there, so I want to break that down just a little bit.

First of all, our national debt of $1.3 trillion is relative to a $2-trillion national economy. For every dollar the Canadian economy generates, about 65¢ of it has an obligation attached to it. Now, a trillion dollars is a massive amount of money. If we cashed it into $100 bills and stacked those bills into billion-dollar piles, we would have 1,000 piles, each climbing about a kilometre high. That is what we are talking about in terms of what this money would look like. However, that is still viewing the situation from 20,000 feet, so let us zoom in at the ground level for a little better perspective.

For Canada's population of about 39 million people, the share of the total national debt is now about $34,000 for every person in the country. For every family of five in Canada, there is about $170,000 in debt. We can think about what that could mean for the average Canadian family of five and what they could do with that $170,000, if they had that for themselves instead of it being their share of the national debt.

Let us say a person has kids in hockey. A good, reasonably decent youth composite hockey stick, which everyone uses nowadays, is about $90 or so. The kids in that family of five would certainly never have to worry about breaking a hockey stick ever again. In fact, every one of their friends would never have to worry about it again either, because that $170,000 would buy about 1,800 hockey sticks.

A family of five can easily spend $400 or more a week on groceries these days with all the inflation, which means that $170,000 would cover food for that whole family for over eight years. Instead, under the Liberals, Canadian families are struggling to feed themselves. Food banks in Canada received a record two million visits in a single month last year, with a million additional people expected this year.

Examples of what Canadians could do with their own money is endless, but those dollars are not enriching Canadian families at all under the Liberal government. Those dollars represent the money that is owed to bankers and bondholders as their share of the Prime Minister's debt. It is interesting to be able to visualize that, but it is not a theoretical exercise. It is actually having real impacts on Canadians right now here today. The Prime Minister's inflationary deficits are driving up interest rates. He is endangering our social safety nets and our jobs by adding more inflationary debt. His government has caused rent and mortgage payment costs to double and made it harder to save for a down payment for so many young families who are just dreaming of getting into the housing market for the first time but wondering how that will ever be possible.

Those are the problems facing Canada right now, but what is the fix? Common-sense Conservatives have solutions. In fact, we have offered the Liberals a starting point to fix it. We told the Prime Minister that we would support his budget if he would just take three very simple, small little steps towards addressing the affordability issues that are plaguing Canadians by starting to address the debt. We needed to see the Liberal government, at minimum, axe the Liberal tax on food, focus on building homes and not building up more federal government bureaucracy and cap the out-of-control government spending by finding a dollar in savings for every new dollar in spending.

The Liberals did none of that. Instead, they went further down the road of recklessness, adding $40 billion more to the growing federal debt.

Common-sense Conservatives cannot support a budget that continues to further indebt Canadians. We will vote non-confidence in a Prime Minister that has driven this country into the ground. I want to know this: Will the NDP have the backbone to do the same?

The government needs to be run in the same way that people have to run their households. A Canadian family that found itself paying more on their credit card debt and on interest than on their necessities would quickly realize that they had to address their debt load. The government, in a similar circumstance, chooses to open new lines of credit to keep on spending. If the government approached budgeting the way Canadian households have to, with actual needs weighed against available resources, the craziness of paying more to bankers and bondholders in one year than what it funds the provinces for health care would be apparent to every single other Canadian, but not to the people sitting on those benches over there in the Liberal government.

Under this government, the promise of Canada has become a promissory note to its debt holders. The Liberals have tried to rebrand their undisciplined fiscal policy as equal to the aspirations of Canadians, but let us look at the real promise of Canada. It is not the agenda of bigger government that the government promotes. It is certainly not about transforming society to reflect Liberal ideology, despite what Liberals would have people believe.

The promise of Canada is, in fact, about the opportunity and freedom to forge one's way in life. Canada has long held out the hope of achievement and prosperity for those who do the work and follow the rules, that a comfortable, secure, middle-class existence is open to anyone from any walk of life, from anywhere in the world, who works to earns it.

In year nine of the Liberal government, life in Canada has never been more unaffordable. The middle class is just a distant dream for far too many. Canadians looking for the Liberals to change things in their budget this year must be feeling incredibly disappointed, with reckless spending, deeper debt and deficits and, of course, the harmful carbon tax.

With these and other policies, Liberals are fuelling inflation and an affordability crisis, pushing middle-class aspirations even further out of the reach of many. Struggling families cannot afford more inflationary spending that drives up their cost of living. They cannot afford the interest rates on their mortgages, their taxes, all of these things.

Even Liberal spending on social programs is not as it actually seems. Many of the measures announced in the budget are deferred, so that the government can make feel-good promises now and then try to find loopholes to get out of them later. We have seen that with dental care and the other social spending Liberals have rolled out that did not quite come anywhere near as advertised. We are seeing it with defence spending promises that stretch out 20 years into the future, when they are needed now.

After nine years, the Liberals' budget is just more of the same that brought us into this mess in the first place. The Prime Minister is proving that he is not worth the cost for any generation, and it will be generations well into the future that will have to repay all of his debt.

It is clear that only common-sense Conservatives have a plan to stop the inflationary deficits that are driving up interest rates. We will protect Canada's social programs and jobs by stopping the piling-on of more federal debt.

Only common-sense Conservatives have a plan to bring down the cost of energy, food and everything else. We will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. Conservatives will govern with common sense for this country, for all its people, in all its regions.

Canada's middle-class dream can once again eclipse the Liberals' debt and deficit nightmare.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, I am sitting back here and I am listening to the member recite something that might have been written by the Conservative spin doctors behind the curtains, trying to put a little bit of passion into it.

Let me try to portray what the Conservative Party is really all about. When Conservatives talk about issues such as the deficit and the “dollar for dollar” in spending and cutting, what it really means is that things such as pharmacare, dental care and child care programs are all on the axing block. The Conservatives are all about cuts and austerity. They do not believe that the national government has a role. Instead, what they really believe in are things such as the Diagolon group, which is the extreme right, which preaches hatred, among many other things, and revolution.

Can the member explain to Canadians why it is that the leader of the Conservative Party allows himself to be tied to an organization such as that? All it does is reinforce the idea that the Conservative Party is being driven by the extreme far right.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Madam Speaker, how pathetic is the desperation we hear over there in bringing up these ideas? What we are talking about is a Liberal budget that will burden future generations of Canadians, so far into the future that we cannot even imagine it. It will endanger all of the things Canadians rely on, as a result of the Prime Minister's desire to spend money like it is going out of style. The only thing the member can come up with is, “Oh, the Conservatives. There is some group that likes them.” What desperation there is over there. The Liberals know that Canadians want a government that will bring common sense back to this country. They are desperate to hold onto the jobs they are about to lose in the next election.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to hear my colleague's thoughts on how often these budget measures interfere in Quebec's jurisdictions. I could give one example after another. It is starting to get ridiculous.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Banff—Airdrie, AB]

Madam Speaker, I think there is a government right now that has created division in our country among different groups of Canadians, among the regions of Canada and among the different provinces. What we have seen as a result of that is that people, whether Quebeckers or all other Canadians, are looking at the government and seeing that it is tired and does not have anything to offer Canadians other than division, corruption and all the things that Canadians are so sick and tired of.

It is time to get rid of the government. It is time to replace it with a common-sense government that will govern for all Canadians.