Mr. Speaker, it is a great privilege to rise on behalf of the residents of Vaughan—Woodbridge. I rise today to speak to budget 2025 and the choice it represents for our country: whether we return to fiscal sanity and economic hope or we keep layering new debt and new bureaucracy on top of the old problems we refuse to fix.
Canadians remember how we got here. I want to take everyone back to just one year ago to the 2024 fall economic statement, which triggered a full-blown political crisis within the Liberal government. The deficit in that document was so alarming that the former finance minister walked away and resigned from cabinet and the government fell into chaos. The former finance minister found this deficit so preposterous and so outrageous that it ultimately led to the resignation of Prime Minister Trudeau.
Canadians were then told that a new prime minister, the current Prime Minister, a former central banker, would restore stability. They were promised a steady hand, fiscal responsibility and a break from the decade of recklessness.
Budget 2025 proves the opposite. The deficit that helped topple the last Liberal government has now been doubled. The Parliamentary Budget Officer projects deficits averaging over $64 billion a year for the next five years. Public debt has blown past $1.3 trillion. This budget alone adds more than $320 billion in new debt over the next five years, more than twice what the previous Liberal government was on track to adding over that same period.
Let me break down the outrageous debt level so that people watching at home can get a proper scope of how disastrous the government is. It is roughly $10 million in new debt every hour of every day. That is not renewal. This is indeed acceleration of the worst instincts of a Liberal government that has been in power for far too long. It is a government with no actual plan to get this country back on track. The budget implementation act, which we are debating today, would lock this path in.
Canadians were told there would be fiscal anchors. The Prime Minister promised to balance the operating budget within three years to ensure a declining deficit-to-GDP ratio and a declining debt-to-GDP ratio. However, the Parliamentary Budget Officer now says there is only about a 7.5% chance of meeting even the first of those anchors. He has testified that there is a low probability the government will respect any of its own targets. This means the anchors were not actually anchors after all.
Instead of fixing the problem, the government has tried to redefine it. In order to make the claim the Liberals will be balancing the operating budget, they have quietly rewritten what counts as capital spending. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has been very clear. This new definition of capital investment is “overly expansive”, and it goes far beyond what is used in our own public accounts and beyond international practice, including the system of national accounts, an internationally agreed upon standard for compiling measures of economic activity that is used in countries like the United Kingdom.
By shifting tax expenditures, investment tax credits and operating subsidies over to the capital column, the government makes day-to-day spending look smaller on paper. According to the PBO, if we were to use the widely accepted definition, so-called capital investment would actually be $94 billion lower and operating expenses would be higher over the next five years than what the government claims. Under that more honest definition, the operating budget never actually balances at all.
Regardless of the fact the Liberals are trying to mislead Canadians to make it seem like they are competent stewards of the public treasury, debt is debt, and no matter how they cook the books, they are still adding an insane amount of money to the public debt. Creditors do not care which column the government hides it in. Every dollar the government borrows must be paid back with interest. Under this budget, interest costs alone will reach more than $55 billion this year and grow toward $76 billion by the end of the decade. That will be more than we send to provinces for health care and more than we collect in GST.
Fitch Ratings has already warned that the budget's massive spending increases and debt burden weaken Canada's credit profile and underscore what it calls “the erosion of the federal government’s finances.” It notes that because fiscal rules are non-binding, “federal finances run a high risk of further deterioration.” Tax expert Kim Moody described this as “a horrible budget that will cripple our future generations.” As he put it, “The good parts are minor cameos, the bad dominates the middle, and the ugly rides off with our future saddled in debt.”
Canadians did not vote for this. Just six months ago, they were promised something completely different from the government. They were promised a $62-billion deficit, which is already high enough, not a $78-billion one. They were promised a declining debt-to-GDP ratio, but it is rising, and less spending, not $90 billion more. They were promised fiscal anchors that would not be discarded in a matter of months. What people voted for and what they got are not the same thing, but is anyone surprised? They have been living this nightmare for the last decade.
I would like to move into the direct impact of this budget, because the damage caused by this recklessness is not just abstract.
In my community of Vaughan—Woodbridge and across the GTA, the housing crisis is the sharpest edge of these failed policies. Before the election, the government promised to build half a million homes a year. Today, we are not even close.
Home starts have cratered. From January to October, we have barely seen 200,000 starts nationwide. In the GTA, new home sales have collapsed. Compared with the recent 10-year average, single-family home sales are down by more than half. Condo sales are down by far more. Developers are laying off workers, projects are being shelved and young families are stuck. Plumbers, electricians, contractors and tradespeople are all feeling the pressure.
Development charges and the hidden taxes on new housing, coupled with GST and HST, can add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of a home in the GTA. The cost of government now makes up roughly 30% to 40% of the price of a new home in the GTA.
During their election campaign in the spring, the Liberals promised to cut these charges in half. In the budget, that promise simply disappeared. There is no concrete plan to cut these costs, just frameworks, negotiations and more processes.
On housing, the government's answer is yet another bureaucracy: Build Canada Homes. It is as if the government wants our children to be renters forever. Do the Liberals want us to forget about the Canadian ideal of actually owning a home? It sure seems that way.
Instead of billions on housing measures that will not work, why do they not listen to industry? Why did they not listen to the municipalities and help support the reduction of fees and taxes that are preventing builders from building and keeping the price of homes out of reach? Why did they not steal our plan to remove the GST off all home purchases under $1.3 million, not just for the first-time homebuyer?
This same instinct shows up in productivity. The Bank of Canada has warned that Canada is stuck in what it calls a “vicious circle of weak productivity”, a systemic problem that makes it harder to meet today's challenges and seize tomorrow's opportunities. The deputy governor has pointed out that regulatory burden and lack of competition are key drags on growth and has urged thoughtful, systematic efforts to reduce those barriers, yet this budget responds to productivity and regulatory issues by creating even more bureaucracy.
We get the new Major Projects Office, layered on top of existing departments and regulations, instead of a real fix for the broken impact assessment rules of Bill C-69 and Bill C-48. We get the new Defence Investment Agency, another organization headquartered in the capital, instead of procurement reform that would let Canadian firms deliver ships, planes and equipment on time and on budget.
My greatest concern is not just what this budget does to today's economy, but what it does to tomorrow's Canadians. Future generations have no vote on this budget, but they will live with its consequences. They will inherit a country where more and more of every tax dollar goes to bureaucracy instead of hospitals, instead of homes, instead of innovation and instead of jobs.
Conservatives believe in a different path, a path where government lives within its means so that Canadians can live within theirs. I voted against this budget and will keep pressing for a direction that restores discipline, creates room for investments and gives young Canadians a reason to believe that the country's best days are ahead of it, not behind.