Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address the government's budget 2025 and its implementation plan, Bill C-15.
We have heard this story before about generational investments, Liberal investments, leading to growth. We have heard this story because Justin Trudeau made the same promises 10 years ago. Budget 2025 is just more missed priorities, dangerous gambles and a complete disregard for the long-term finances of Canada.
For an entire decade, Canadians have been told to just wait, to wait for results and affordability. Instead of results, they have watched their paycheques shrink, their mortgages rise and their cost of living explode, all while the government continues to pat itself on the back for programs that have not delivered for Canadians.
Canadians watching this at home deserve clarity, so I will focus on three failures of the Liberal budget. First, the government plans to have endless deficits while printing money to bring back economic investment and growth for Canadians despite the Parliamentary Budget Officer's warning of even higher deficits ahead. Second, the budget mortgages the future of our youth, forcing them to pay tomorrow for today's mistakes. Finally, there is an explosion of bureaucracy and new agencies that spend even more taxpayer money without delivering results.
First, I will start with how printing money and running massive deficits is not an economic plan. For 10 years now, Liberals have insisted that deficits pay for themselves. The facts are clear: That has not worked.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer, the independent fiscal watchdog, has made it extremely clear: The budget's deficits will average $65 billion over the next four years, up dramatically from last year. The federal debt-to-GDP ratio is no longer on a declining track despite the government's repeated promises. As well, interest payments, money that delivers zero services to Canadians, are projected to rise to over 11% of revenues by the end of the decade.
The Prime Minister is supposed to be a great economist, but this is not fiscal management; this is a fiscal failure. What is the Liberal government's response? It is to have more spending and more borrowing. The worst part is the clever accounting tricks Liberals have played to distract Canadians from their disastrous spending.
According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, by trying to separate operational spending from capital investments, the Liberals have expanded the definition so far that they have included about 94 billion dollars' worth of spending that does not actually count as investment. This means that the generational investments that Liberals have been sloganizing are actually 30% lower than advertised. Worse yet, according to the PBO's definition, the day-to-day operating balance after their new budget would still be in a deficit position.
The Liberals continue to act as though they can bend economic reality to their will, as though deficits do not matter, as though inflation cannot rise and as though the PBO is not highlighting their economic sleight of hand. Well, deficits do matter. Debt does matter, and ignoring the warnings of the Parliamentary Budget Officer is not leadership; it is irresponsible and dangerous.
Second, the budget sacrifices and mortgages young Canadians. Every dollar borrowed today must be repaid with interest by the generations that follow us, yet the government continues to destroy young people with higher future taxes, higher interest costs and fewer dollars available for things they actually rely on. When he tabled the budget, the Minister of Finance said, “To the youth, this budget was made for you”. How exactly does forcing young people to pay for government deficits and soaring debt help them? The budget does nothing for the youth today, but they will be forced to pay off all the government's overspending tomorrow. Young people between the ages of 15 and 24, who are just graduating, are facing the highest unemployment rate the country has seen in decades.
According to an article, an economic policy professor from the University of Toronto said that we are “teetering on the edge of a recession”, which will “have a disproportionate impact on young people.” The youth are usually the first and hardest hit when economic conditions are weak. Beyond the job market, young Canadians are trying to enter a housing market that is completely out of reach.
Youth are watching their friends move back home, delaying starting families or leaving the country altogether to search for opportunity. They are not choosing these things but being pushed into them by government policies that have made life unaffordable. Today's youth are already facing a housing crisis, an impossible-to-enter job market and high living costs. Now the Liberals are saying not to worry; on top of all that, they get to pay for the Liberals' overspending for decades to come.
Conservatives refuse to accept that. We believe the government should leave the next generation stronger, not burdened under a weight they did not choose.
Third, the budget explodes bureaucracy instead of producing results. The cost of the federal bureaucracy has increased by 80% since 2015, growing by $6 billion just last year. Canadians are not asking for more agencies or more layers of red tape; they are asking for results that actually make their lives better.
What does budget 2025 deliver to solve the issues concerning Canadians? It doubles bureaucracies to do the jobs of already existing agencies. We can take Build Canada Homes as an example. It was created to work with other sectors and departments to make housing more available and affordable. There is one problem, which is that this already exists. We already have the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which has programs to finance affordable housing and was already tasked with overseeing the national housing strategy. Instead of fixing its failures, the government simply creates new agencies to hide old problems. It is duplication dressed up as innovation.
At the public accounts committee, which I sit on, we have received report after report from the Auditor General that have all been damning. The common thread in all of them is that we have too much bureaucracy and government overspending and not enough accountability. In all these reports, we see spending shooting way over the budgets that have been set out. We see no system of accountability, no progress tracking and no real consequences for poor management. The government promises results but delivers bloated bureaucracy.
The budget promises to bring federal spending down, but the costly budget will keep federal program spending at 15.3% of GDP. This is still higher than prepandemic levels. The government spends 55% of its operating budget on staffing and twice as much on outside consultants.
The PBO has already pointed out that a lot of what the Liberals call capital investments is actually reoccurring program spending, or ongoing operating costs disguised as long-term investment. This is not transparency; it is not accountability, and it is certainly not value for money. We have seen this before. The government creates a new agency to solve a problem, and the agency demands more staff, more funding and more time. Years later, the problem is still there, but the bureaucracy is bigger and more bloated.
Canadians deserve a government that focuses on results. We have heard from the Liberals that global conditions require higher deficits, that investment demands patience and that one more agency is the solution to the problem, but Conservatives believe in something better. We believe in spending discipline, not deficit addiction; we believe in empowering our youth and setting them up to become the future of this great country, and we believe that government should measure success by outcomes and not by how much tax money it burns through.
The choice before the House is simple: a government that treats the national credit card like an unlimited resource or a government that recognizes its responsibility to future generations. The budget fails on fiscal responsibility. It fails on the next generation. It fails on accountability and results.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer has raised the alarm. Young Canadians are already paying the price, but the Prime Minister wants to make the bill bigger. The government's answer is to simply spend more. Conservatives reject that approach. We believe in restoring fiscal anchors; we believe in protecting the next generation, not mortgaging them, and we believe in a government that delivers real results and not bigger bureaucracy.