Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to the Liberal budget, a budget put forward by the government that I believe to be fiscally reckless, utterly immoral and lacking any kind of grand unifying vision that Canada, at this moment in its history, so desperately needs.
I speak first and foremost, as always, on behalf of my constituents of North Island—Powell River. However, I also feel duty-bound to speak today on behalf of another group of Canadians, a group without voice and without champion, a group of Canadians who are all too often overlooked, whose interests are marginalized and whose concerns are ignored. I speak of course of future generations, of people still in cradles, strollers and schools, and of those yet to be born.
Over the last 10 years of Liberal government, the debt being left to these future generations to pay for has doubled. Put another way, the Liberals have borrowed more money since 2015 than every other government in the history of this country combined, borrowing even more money than it took to build the national railway and to win the Second World War, and that is accounting for inflation.
Before the unveiling of this budget, I think many Canadians, including those of us here in opposition, were hoping for something bold and something special, a budget that was transformative, that was daring, that marked a clear departure from the decade of Justin Trudeau and that set Canada on a new fiscally sustainable path that a majority of Canadians could support with pride.
Instead, we got more than $300 billion in new debt and the largest deficit in Canadian history outside COVID. In other words, it was nothing remotely transformative at all but rather a simple continuation of the same old Liberal policies of spending money that we do not have and leaving the bill to the next generation to pay. If the same policies are enacted, we should not expect a different result.
For starters, we can expect the taxpayer money wasted paying interest on our debt to rise even further, with the government's own projections forecasting a 37% increase, to more than $76.1 billion a year. That is more than 11¢ of every dollar that Canadians pay in taxes squandered, taxpayer money that cannot be spent on roads, health care or Canada's national defence. It is money that is wasted paying interest to big banks on Bay Street.
Because governments rarely if ever pay back the principal on their debt, Canadians have to pay the interest over and over again, year after year. In fact Canada's federal debt today stands at around $1.2 trillion, yet since 1980, Canadians have paid over $1.4 trillion just in interest on that debt. I have not met a single Canadian who thinks that has been a good return on investment for them.
With the Liberals' announcing plans to spend and borrow even more, the problem will only be getting worse. Just to be clear, this is not an issue with taxes being too low, or some sort of government revenue problem. In 2015, when the budget was balanced, the government took in $282 billion in taxes and other government revenues. For the current fiscal year, today the government projects that number to be $507 billion, an increase of more than 80%.
The issue, instead, is reckless, totally unrestrained government spending that has increased during that same time period by 109%, to $586 billion this fiscal year. Now the Liberals have announced, in this budget, that they want to spend $90 billion more. What is their justification for all the spending and all the debt? It is the same tired refrain as it has always been, that Canadians need their government to step up to do and spend more.
However, if we look back on the last 10 years of faltering economic growth and ballooning national debt, we see the exact opposite. Canada's economic stagnation is not due to government not stepping up in any particular way. Canada's economic stagnation is the direct result of government, and the Liberal government in particular, getting in the way, whether by blocking pipelines like northern gateway and energy east, by scaring away investment with bills like Bill C-69 and Bill C-48 and the industrial carbon tax, or by overseeing a dramatic increase in federal spending and a doubling of Canada's national debt, with almost no discernible benefits to everyday Canadians.
What is more is that all of this reckless spending and borrowing has another cost: high inflation.
My grandfather, who will be turning 95 years old next month, first came to Canada in 1956, fleeing persecution and communism in eastern Europe. He instilled in me a very basic lesson early in life: There is no such thing as a free lunch, that everything has a cost and that eventually all bills come due.
That is also true about government spending and borrowing massive amounts of money. If the government injects billions of dollars into the economy without producing more of what that money buys, it will not make Canadians any richer or any better off; it will simply devalue the Canadian dollar and by extension make the same goods more expensive than they were before. That is why, over the last decade of the Liberal government, we have experienced the highest levels of inflation in 30 years, at a time when the majority of Canadians identify the cost of living as the single most pressing concern in the country.
At a time when Canadians identify the rising price of goods and homes as their most important issue, the government has introduced a massive budget deficit that will make that exact problem even worse. Because assets like homes and stocks tend to experience a corresponding increase in value along with inflation, inflating the money supply always ends up hurting most the people with less, especially younger Canadians. It is truly a regressive economic and social policy that prioritizes political short-sightedness over long-term economic strength and generational equity.
Of course, our Prime Minister claims that he is not spending more money and that nothing could be farther from the truth. Instead, he is investing; he is building Canada strong. The truth is that a deficit is a deficit, and government debt is government debt. All the money that is borrowed in tax goes into one giant pot and then is spent on a variety of government priorities. Creditors do not care if we borrowed the money in order to build a road, to pay teachers or to buy new submarines. It all costs interest. It all erodes our fiscal capacity as a country, and it is all being passed on to the next generation to pay for.
Here is the kicker. The new Prime Minister, the fiscal hawk, the central banker, is planning to borrow more than double what Justin Trudeau was planning: $321 billion over the next five years.
Many people probably know me from my last five or six years of making political documentaries or other short films, but before that I worked with a group called the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. My role at the CTF was to organize and tour its giant debt clock, which showed how much debt governments in Canada had racked up and how fast that number was ticking up, to university campuses right across this country, to wake up the next generation whose future was being mortgaged by a cabal of politicians either too blind or too self-serving to recognize and admit a truth that only numbers can truly tell: that this country was and is on the path to insolvency and that we are leaving young Canadians with the bill.
It is for this reason more than any other that, as a Conservative, I will be opposing this budget, a budget that spends and borrows on the backs of those who in the last election did not have a vote and did not have a say.
This brings to mind a very Canadian thing that used to happen, and I suppose still sometimes happens, at Tim Hortons drive-throughs right across this country, where people would pay it forward. Someone would drive up to the window, only to find out that an anonymous stranger in the car in front of them had paid for their coffee and their doughnut. It was always a pleasant surprise.
For future generations, the government's budget is the exact opposite. It is like someone's driving up to the window with $5 in hand to cover their double-double and Boston cream, only to find out that the guy in front of them had not paid his bill and that now they are on the hook for not only their own meal but for his as well. That is government debt. It is unethical, it is unfair, and it is something I hope all parliamentarians will join me in fighting and voting against.
