Madam Speaker, I am pleased to lead off second reading debate for His Majesty's loyal opposition on Bill C-69, the NDP and Liberals' budget implementation bill. I am disappointed that there will be so few Conservatives allowed to speak on this bill. That being said, we will deal with it at a later date in committee. I know the House will be shocked to learn that I will be voting against this budget bill, and I will tell members why.
As the opposition critic for industry, I have been focused on Canada's declining prosperity since 2015. The public policy choices of the Liberals have caused this decline in prosperity because of three major choices the Liberals made. Number one is that we have too much debt in Canada. Number two is that the world no longer buys enough of what Canada makes, our exports. Number three is that too many oligopolistic industries are charging Canadians too much for their services.
Let us start with the first point: too much debt. When the government debt grows faster than the economy, which is how the Liberals have been managing the country's finances, we eventually hit a wall. Liberal debt has caused inflation, which has caused interest rates to rise. Liberal inflation and interest rates have doubled housing costs and have hurt Canadians. For the ninth year in a row, the NDP-Liberals are running a huge deficit. This year alone, it is $40 billion, and a balanced budget is not even in their thinking.
Let us look at the numbers the budget the Liberals are so proud of proposes. The Liberal spending spree continues with $61 billion in new spending initiatives. The national debt will rise to a record $1.37 trillion. Interest on the national debt will rise from $26.6 billion in the last year of the Harper government to $64.3 billion. Debt interest payments will be more than what Ottawa spends on health care and twice what it spends on national defence.
The budget projects the government's spending to grow to $608 billion, which is $328 billion more than the first year of the Liberal government in 2015. That is a 117% increase in spending alone under the Liberals. That increase alone is more than the entire Harper budget of the last year. In case someone is worried about it, revenue, which is taxes, will rise from $282 billion in 2015 to $586 billion. In other words, government tax revenue has gone up by $304 billion, or 108% under the Liberal government. However, spending has gone up 117%, hence the debt.
If government spending made for a stronger economy and for more powerful paycheques for Canadians, we would be leading the world on our standard of living. However, that is not what Canadians are experiencing. Instead, what we have is a homegrown affordability and productivity crisis. The price of everything has gone up, and productivity per worker has declined. Since 2022, inflation-adjusted GDP per capita, which is an indication of living standards, declined from $60,000 to $58,000 in only a year and a half into 2023 and is now below where it was in 2014, a decade ago.
In other words, declining incomes at a time of rising costs of food, fuel, heating and everything, while our incomes are sliding back, make it more difficult for people to afford daily life. It is a double hit on Canadians thanks to the NDP-Liberals. Clearly, the record spending by the NDP-Liberal government, with the Liberal finance minister adding 62% of Canada's national debt, is not making people better off; it is making things worse.
This is the result of the disastrous policy choices of the NDP-Liberals on deficits, spending, government manipulation of the free market and policy choices to destroy Canada's competitive advantage over other countries, and those are our natural resource industries.
Let us turn to my second point. The world is not buying enough of what Canada creates anymore. As a small nation globally, in terms of population, Canada needs to export in order to maintain and to grow our living standards.
I spent most of my career in business, and when one's company has a competitive advantage, one innovates and works extremely hard to grow and to protect that competitive advantage, otherwise one's business declines and eventually dies. To export what Canada does successfully, we need to offer something other countries do not. In the world of nations, what is Canada's competitive advantage? It is our natural resources. Those include renewables, such as agriculture, fisheries and forestry, and non-renewables, such as minerals, oil and gas. We have been blessed like few others. We need to lead in exporting those commodities and the technology to harvest them.
We do not hear Saudi Arabia saying that they are glad they do not have all those forests to manage like Canada. We do not hear Germany saying that they are glad they do not have all that Canadian oil and gas to manage. In fact, Germany is begging for our oil and gas. However, In 2016, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—