Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-15, the budget implementation act.
On November 4, a couple of weeks ago, the new Minister of Finance, the fourth one since the Liberal Party formed government 10 years ago, presented his first budget, an $80-billion-deficit budget. I have been a member of Parliament for six years now, and I have seen five budgets. All of them have consistently disappointed us.
I ran for public office in 2019, largely on account of Liberal budgeting disasters. I remember that in 2015, when Justin Trudeau was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, he ran on a promise that there were going to be some small to medium-sized deficits for three years, 2016, 2017 and 2018, but by year four of that mandate, 2019, the economy would have improved, and he was going to present a balanced budget.
That did not happen at all. The deficits happened for sure, but by 2019 Mr. Trudeau was saying not to worry about the budget and that “the budget will balance itself.” That is when I woke up to realize I could not just sit back complaining anymore. I had to jump into the fray and try to do something about it, so I ran in 2019 under the Conservative banner in the hope that we were going to form government and turn the ship around.
Unfortunately the Liberals won again. This time it was a minority government, and the wasteful inflationary spending continued year after year. During the next few years, the Liberals doubled the national debt from $600 billion to $1.2 trillion. Most people have trouble understanding those big numbers. I certainly do; that is a lot of zeroes.
I remember one late-night debate in the middle of the pandemic, when we were debating pandemic spending by the government. Our current party leader, who was then the member of Parliament for Carleton and our finance critic, asked the then finance minister a hypothetical question: What if interest rates were to go up 1%? What would that cost in extra interest payments to service the debt? At that time, our debt was projected to be $1 trillion dollars. She refused to answer, so the former member for Carleton kept asking the question, and she kept refusing to answer it.
I pulled out my little calculator because I was curious to see what the answer was, but there were not enough digit spaces on my calculator, so I got out my pen and paper and wrote it out: Multiply $1 trillion by 1%, then move the decimal place over two points to the left, which is $10 billion. The then finance minister refused to answer, because she knew the answer; it is not hard.
I realized at the time that this is real debt, despite what the then finance minister was saying. She was accusing the then member for Carleton of fearmongering, saying not to worry about it, that interest rates are low, money is free, we should borrow everything that we can to invest in Canadians, and that inflation will never happen. That was only three or four years ago.
One thing that is absolutely true is that the debt is real debt. Another $80 billion is being added to it, and our total debt is going to be $1.35 trillion over the next couple of years.
I have a couple of examples to understand these very big numbers. One is to recognize that the servicing debt is $55 billion, which is more than the federal government pays in health transfers. It is also more than we spend on national defence. These are real numbers, and they are having real, negative impacts on our ability to run a profitable economy.
To help understand the numbers a bit better, I will say that the amount of money to service the debt, not even to pay it down but just to pay the interest on it, is more than the government collects in HST. Every time we go to the store, pull out a credit card to purchase something and take a look at what the receipt says, the amount of HST is going to bankers and bondholders instead of to health care, to doctors and nurses.
The Liberals on the other side of the House, who think they are helping Canadians by going deeper into debt, will have this to say: “Do not worry, 22 million Canadians are getting a tax cut.” It is a very modest tax cut. I am sure it will be appreciated, but it will be roughly enough money for a family to be able to take the kids to McDonald's once a week. That is not the answer, and people are concerned.
I have a few emails, quotes from people in my riding who are deeply concerned about the financial viability of this country. Erika writes this: “In the latest budget, the Liberals want astoundingly high federal expenditures which will leave our economy in shambles.”
Joe writes, “The amount of the predicted deficit is completely out of control. Not only is the current generation getting [shortchanged], the next two or three generations are never going to be able to dig themselves out of this horrific hole. You are using tomorrow's money to pay yesterday's bills.”
Here is one more, from Deborah: “We now pay more weekly in debt servicing interest payments, than our [government] pays for medical transfers to the provinces.... That's a lot of potential hospitals burned up in smoke every week.”
I know that the Liberals will tell these people not to worry about debt, that it does not matter, but Canadians are not fooled that easily.
I want to address two things I have heard many times from Liberal members of the House, on the stats they use to brush aside these concerns. First, the Liberals say that Canada's debt-to-GDP ratio is pretty good, perhaps the best in the world, but one thing they forget to do, probably intentionally but maybe inadvertently, is to add subnational debt. The provinces have debt too, and if we add that in, our debt is actually twice as big.
The second macro issue that Liberals like to sweep under the carpet is our lagging productivity numbers, which matter because productivity is the best measure of a nation's ability to able to create wealth, which then gets passed on to its citizens. To the credit of previous finance ministers, they have recognized this as a problem. In her 2022 budget speech, this is what the former minister of finance said:
Our third pillar for growth is a plan to tackle the Achilles heel of the Canadian economy: productivity and innovation....
However, we are falling behind when it comes to economic productivity. Productivity matters because it is what guarantees the dream of every parent—that our children will be more prosperous than we are. This is a well-known Canadian problem and an insidious one. It is time for Canada to tackle it.
The same former minister of finance, a couple of years later in the 2024 budget speech, said:
The third part of our plan is growing the economy in a way that is shared by everyone.
To drive the kind of growth Canada needs today, we are redoubling our efforts to attract investment, increase productivity and boost innovation.
Most recently, in the 2025 budget speech just a couple of weeks ago, the current finance minister had this to say about productivity: The government is fully focused “on boosting productivity—doing more with less—because that is the best way to raise [the] standard of living.” I agree with that, and I applaud them for at least recognizing that there is a problem.
I want to point out that I am splitting my time with the member for Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier.
Why does productivity matter? Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said this many years ago, and it is a good quote: “Productivity isn't everything, but, in the long run, it is almost everything.”
It is just like for a family; the more take-home pay there is, the better the family is able to service its debt or pay the mortgage. It is the same with a business; the more profitable it is, the more it can manage its debt and grow its business. Debt is not a bad thing; it is the inability to be able to service debt that is the bad thing. When the federal government is spending more on debt servicing than they are on health care transfers, we have a problem. To quote Deborah once again, “That's a lot of potential hospitals burned up in smoke every week.”
I have been here for six years, and in all that time, things have not improved despite the government's promising that it was going to improve productivity. The time is now.
