Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise here today.
What we are talking about today with this motion is ending the Justin Trudeau-style economic philosophy and the Justin Trudeau-style budgeting and getting back to the basics here. We are talking about investments today and different things.
Before I get started, I should congratulate the Toronto Blue Jays on a great victory and a great series. It was excellent. We can all agree on that in the House. It is a bit of unity before we get the punching in. What did the Blue Jays do? We can give them credit for private investment. They spent $750 million over the past few years updating the Rogers Centre, and they did not ask for any government money that I know of. They had a business case, they went about it and they did it. I think they did it on time and on budget. Now, they are into the next round of playoffs, and they are getting their return on investment.
That is really what we are talking about here today. We have to unleash the private business investment in this country. We have to become more attractive to foreign companies and our own domestic companies so they make a decision to invest in Canada. There is far too much red tape and obstruction to do that.
There was a Liberal MP who spoke about 20 minutes ago, and what she said was interesting. She said that the Liberals created a new program to deal with all the red tape and delay in the programs. Well, guess who created all that red tape and delay in the programs? The Liberal government has been around so long that it is trying to fix the devastation it created, but that is never going to happen, because the Liberals do not know how to fix it.
If we go back 10 years, Stephen Harper and Joe Oliver delivered a budget in the legacy of Jim Flaherty. It was a balanced budget. The government expenditures that year were $289 billion for a balanced budget. The entire net debt for the country was $610 billion, which is a lot. The debt-to-GDP ratio at that time was just over 31% and declining. We really were, after a number of years, becoming a destination for the world to do business.
Justin Trudeau came along and said, “Look, I'm just going to spend a bit more over the next three years. I'm going to have a balanced budget in 2020 and a little deficit in the medium term, or $10 billion a year, so some investment can kick-start the economy.” Now, that should have been deadpanned right from the beginning because, with a $2-trillion economy, $10 billion is really not going to get the job done. Right from the beginning, we knew it. Canadians should have known that, when a person comes in with that kind of philosophy, it is going to fail.
Fast-forward to today and the net debt is $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion, and the gross debt is way more. The debt-to-GDP ratio for just Canada, not for all the provinces combined, is 45%, I believe. The deficit this year, incredibly, will be higher than a Justin Trudeau deficit at approximately $62.5 billion.
All the while, the Liberals have been telling Canadians that we just need to invest a little more to the point where, now, in 2024-25, I believe total government expenditure is at $450 billion. In 10 years, we have increased the size of government by well over 50%, we have more than doubled Canada's debt permanently and we have added burden onto young Canadians that will last their lifetime and generations down the line, all because Justin Trudeau said 10 years ago that we were going to make a wee investment. He used the phrase “modest short-term deficit”. He also used a phrase that came back to bite him pretty hard: “the budget will balance itself”.
The other chief architect of this commentary is now the Prime Minister. He was Trudeau's adviser all the way along. When Canadians were looking at him in the winter and through the spring, they thought, “Boy, we've really broken away from this Trudeau guy.” However, what they really did was elect Trudeau on steroids. Now, months later, people cannot believe what they got, and I know because I am out in my community all the time. It is not just in finance and business. It is in everything. It is universal disappointment.
We need to get back to the basics. We need to create an economic climate where we can invite people to do business in our country. We need transparency. We need to know exactly what the rules are. Think about how many times the rules have changed since the Liberals have been in government over the past 10 years. For big projects and little projects, everything is changing all the time.
He said one thing that might be the worst lie he could have told a Canadian, which was that the Liberals took on debt so Canadians would not have to. A lot of Canadians took that literally, five years ago. They are really being hit now, to the point where they are giving keys back to the bank and there are record lineups at food banks. It goes on and on.
Ten years ago, when Stephen Harper, Jim Flaherty and Joe Oliver were putting together budgets, a young family had a future. They could afford to buy a home. They could afford to save for their kids' education. They could put food on the table and not have to rely on government food programs to feed their children at lunchtime. People could afford to buy groceries and put it in their kids' lunch boxes. Canadians could afford to raise their kids, play sports and go on a vacation. They could do all these things. They may have had to work a bit of overtime and save from time to time, but it could be done.
Now that dream is way out in the distance. I talked to somebody the other day who was talking about all the boomerang kids who have come back to live with their families. We never—