Madam Speaker, the Prime Minister's latest mantra is that he wants to eliminate the operating deficit, in other words, the normal net deficit from his bad investments.
However, by his own definition of operating deficit, the Trudeau government achieved a balance or generated a surplus during its first four years. We will overlook the pandemic years. The Trudeau government did not run an operating deficit in 2022-23. In its last year, the so-called operating deficit was $31 billion. In this budget, the operating deficit is $32.5 billion.
First, does this not demonstrate that by increasing program spending, which the Parliamentary Budget Officer says is not capital spending, they are hiding the truth from Quebeckers and Canadians? Second, by spending heavily on programs, is the Prime Minister creating a problem that he is promising to fix later? Is the new creative accounting in this budget not ultimately a way of hiding the true facts?