Madam Speaker, when Canadians saw the budget that was presented to Canada, I think they could have used two words to describe it: sticker shock. It is sticker shock because of the $78 billion presented as the deficit. This is, of course, $16 billion more than the Prime Minister promised during the campaign. It is double what the last prime minister, Justin Trudeau, spent, and he spent more than all prime ministers combined. It is also the most this country has ever spent outside of the pandemic years.
Let us go through some more numbers. There is over $90 billion of new spending. The Liberals have called these generational investments, but they are in fact generational debt. I will talk a bit about what this budget means for those who will have to pay for it later. What I mean by generational debt is the Liberal government would add more than $320 billion of federal debt over the next five years and the cycle of the budget. Again, that is more than what Justin Trudeau was going to add, because he was at about $154 billion.
The budget would add $10 million of debt every hour. That matters, because like any other debt Canadians incur, they pay interest on that debt. We would pay $55 billion just to service that debt every single year. That is not money that would be going to doctors, hospitals or nurses. In fact, it is more than the government transfers to the provinces for health care. It is also the amount the government collects in the GST. This means that every dollar collected in sales tax by the federal government would not go to doctors, hospitals or nurses, but to bankers to service that debt.
The weak economic performance in this budget should alarm Canadians more than just the sticker shock. It has real GDP growth in 2025 at 1.1%, which is the second-lowest in the G7, and unemployment averages at 6.4% over the coming years. The industrial carbon tax would remain in place and will get higher.
This should all be concerning, but what is most concerning about this budget is that it tells a story of two different Canadas that would be created. There would be those who work for wages and see nothing at all in relief in this budget, and those who invest for income. Those two groups have been targeted very differently. The problem is that the first group, those who go to work every single day and collect a paycheque, would not see anything in this budget, and it is concerning.
This country has an overwhelming amount of potential, but it seems that at every turn over the last 10 years, that potential has been squandered. We have everything the world wants, and we should be the richest country in the world, but we have a government that is spending away our future on a credit card with very little to show for it.
We have a federal bureaucracy that has grown by 99,000 workers over the last 10 years, and now we have a government that cannot say where workforce reductions will come from. By the way, none of our services have ever gotten better. In fact, people wait longer for services. People wait on the phone with the CRA only to maybe get somebody, and if they get somebody, 80% of answers have been found to be incorrect. It takes longer to get a passport. It takes longer to reach anybody on the phone, yet the public service has grown and the services have gotten worse. That is what we would end up paying for in this budget.
Let us talk more about the tale of two Canadas. If a person draws their income from a portfolio, this budget might have a few things for them. It has some of the good ideas that we brought forward in the last election campaign, although it does not go far enough.
We talk about resource development. The government has been beating its chest about a pipeline announcement that will come to the table at some point, whether in six days, six weeks or maybe not at all. In case it does come, because the Premier of Alberta and the news media are talking about it like it is a done deal, this is a government that has invested in more bureaucracy rather than just going ahead and getting out of its own way. In order to build a pipeline in this country, we have to get rid of things like a shipping ban off the west coast.
We would applaud the government if it came out and said what it was going to do. We would have to get rid of an oil and gas cap in order for anything to be filled in that pipeline and to take it somewhere, such as tidewater, eventually, where there is still a shipping ban. We would have to reduce the industrial carbon tax, or at least make sure that this particular project does not have that in the way, just like LNG Canada.
All these things need to happen in order for a pipeline to get built. All these things probably will eventually happen while members of the party opposite drag their feet, kicking and screaming. However, it is the Prime Minister who sabotaged all that during his tenure as an adviser to the Liberal government. When the former prime minister cancelled the 2016 pipeline, or when he got in the way of it being built, frankly, and put in that shipping ban, it was the current Prime Minister who cheered him on from the sidelines. People can read about it in his very own book. When I talk about the budget and squandering its potential, these are the things I mean.
This country has the smartest people in the world. We have enough food to feed ourselves and the rest of the world. Instead, there are two million people lined up at food banks. Four million people are going to use a food bank in Canada, and the government wants to be thanked for introducing a food program. That is always the government's answer: Create more bureaucracy. When it cannot get a project built, it announces a project management office that will shuffle papers and eventually give an approval for something that has already been approved, as in the case of one pipeline. If it causes food inflation to soar with its hidden taxes, like an industrial carbon tax that raises the tax on producers, a packaging tax that raises the tax on the purchasers of food or any of the other hidden food taxes, it comes in with a big government program to ensure Canadians will thank them, while two million people are still in the food bank line and while food costs 40% more here than it does in the U.S. It is always about centralization. It is always about making sure we thank the government for bringing in another program to get rid of the problems the government itself has caused over the last 10 years.
That is the tale of the two Canadas. Those who work for a living are constantly trying to get further with less. An inflationary budget that spends $78 billion is going to ensure that it gets worse, not better. Today, we have nine out of 10 young Canadians not believing they will ever buy a home. The government's answer to that was to create yet another housing bureaucracy, the fourth, to try to get houses built when the first three did not work. The government dumped $13 billion into yet another government project.
Canadians who work every single day for wages are wondering what the heck is in this budget for them and when they are going to see some reprieve. We have a lessening standard of living in this country. The fear we have is that young people will just get used to this idea. They will get used to the idea that they cannot afford a good meal, that they cannot afford to purchase a home and that they cannot afford a good-quality life in what should be the richest country in the world. It was not like this 10 years ago.
This budget does nothing to alleviate the pain of those who go to work every single day and who are looking to the government for answers. It has provided none for those people. That is why the Conservatives cannot and will not support $78 billion of new inflationary spending that will raise taxes and inflation on every single Canadian in every single part of their life.