Madam Speaker, my colleague raises a very good point, which is the fact that what the government is trying to do, and we have seen it happen in corporate Canada before, is move money around into different pots and try to mask the top figure, which is the massive amount of new debt.
What matters is that the government is planning to borrow $321 billion over the next five years and put that money on the back of future generations to pay for. If the government moves money around, it does not matter whether it is put into Crown corporations or whether it is called an investment. When a creditor is lending money, they do not care if the money was borrowed to buy submarines that are going to last 50 years or to pay schoolteachers today. Debt is debt. It all comes with interest. It all affects the carrying capacity of our country.
We need to cut through the spin and look at the bottom line of how much the government is borrowing and how that compares to previous generations. As I pointed out, the government has more than doubled our national debt. It is time to get back to fiscal sanity and fiscal responsibility in this country.