The day-to-day operating balance was minus $4.1 billion under the Liberals' definition for 2024, and it will be $33 billion under their definition for 2025. Is this what spending less on operating expenses looks like to the Prime Minister, increasing the operating deficit by 700%? Have the Liberals gone mad? Do their promises mean nothing?
How are we supposed to have a democracy when someone can run an election on balancing the operating budget and then increase the operating deficit by 700% in their first year? This is a terrible trick on voters. If I was not already signed up for blue team and a well-dressed Goldman Sachs banker ran for prime minister with red team promising to spend less and invest more, I might have believed him. I might have voted for him. That is how much I agree that we should spend less and invest more. Millions of thoughtful and prudent Canadians did believe him and did vote for him. Today the rug has been pulled out from under them. The budget is a sham; the Liberals are spending more.
Before they start shouting about tariffs across the way, those at home can please turn to page 66 of the budget document, Table 1, in which the government estimates that $7 billion of the deficit is due to tariffs, or what they call “Economic and fiscal developments since FES 2024”. Therefore, the operating deficit increases by $33 billion, but only $7 billion of that is in any way a consequence of tariffs. The rest is self-inflicted.
Let us talk about the second half of the Liberals' promise, which is to invest more. The issues are twofold: how much investment there is and whether the investments are good or bad. I thank God for the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Table 1 of the PBO report on the budget shows an increase in capital investment based on the PBO definition of $7 billion for 2025. The deficit has doubled from $40 billion to $80 billion, which is a $40-billion increase, and only a fraction of this, or $7 billion, is new investment under this definition. Obviously, this is not generational or transformative, just in terms of the size of the investments, but are they good or are they bad investments?
I am a physician, and I do my own investing for my retirement. How to define an investment as good or bad is very easy. A good investment provides a good rate of return, and a bad investment provides a negative rate of return. To use the Prime Minister's Instagram example, if someone buys a $1-million house, that is indeed an investment. If that house loses 20% of its value, that person is $200,000 poorer, and that is a very bad investment.
Every single year the Liberals have been in power, they have told us that they are taking our money through taxes to invest it for us, because we do not know how to invest as well as they do. They did it in 2015. Their platform promised “historic new investments in infrastructure”. In 2019, their platform promised, “We will run modest deficits for three years so that we can invest in growth for the middle class”. Their 2021 platform promised to “Immediately invest $6 billion...to support the elimination of health system waitlists.”
What sorts of returns did we get on this investment? Did any of that happen? I do not see the historic infrastructure they built from 2015. I do not see that the middle class has experienced growth. In fact, I see that it has been decimated by the Liberals' inflationary deficits. Lastly, as a practising physician, I can promise we are far from eliminating health system wait-lists as they promised; wait-lists are worse now than they have ever been.
Furthermore, the national debt has gone from $600 billion to $1.2 trillion over the last 10 years. None of this quite seems as though the Liberals' investments are paying off. It rather seems as though Canadians know how to invest, but the government keeps taking their money and then investing it on white elephant programs that provide no rate of return.
What is the top-line conclusion of this? It is that we are now spending $60 billion on debt financing. This is more than we spend on health care transfers or on national security. It does not seem to me that in the aggregate or in any specific case, when the Liberals say they are going to take people's money to invest it on their behalf, they do any sort of a great job at it ever. It never seems as though their investments provide anything like an acceptable rate of return. In fact, Bernie Madoff gave his clients a better rate of return.
However, let us take a specific case and drill deeper: housing investment. I find myself asking how many members in the House have ever, with their own hands, built a house from start to finish.