Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise on behalf of our Conservative team to provide my comments and feedback on the Liberals' 10th budget. The more they do it, the more they get used to doing the same thing: adding inflationary deficits to our national debt and raising the cost of living for families in every part of this country.
I have served as a member of Parliament proudly for the last six years. Before that, I served in municipal politics for 12. When I was serving as mayor, as in this role, the one thing I always said is that it is an easy job in politics to tell people what we are going to spend money on; the hard part is telling Canadians how we are going to pay for it.
There is one thing the Liberal government does the best out there. I will give the Liberals credit. I will give them one compliment in my 10-minute speech today. They are the best at photo ops and the word salad in all of the announcements. They make it sound like all of the things they are doing are actually making a difference in the lives of Canadians. The problem is when the reality comes back to them.
What do we see? We see an increased cost of living. We see more difficulty when it comes to affording housing and affording food. Their record is absolutely atrocious. The most frustrating thing when it comes to all of this is their inability to pay for it.
This is what I call a costly credit card budget, in the sense that with a massive $80-billion deficit, they are putting a massive amount of new money on Canada's credit card for future generations to pay. It is about printing more money. It is drives up inflation and drives up the cost of living when they do that.
Again, this has been a pattern we have seen. The Liberals claim to be a new government, but it is absolutely not. This is the same failed approach we have seen for 10 years.
Just look at the numbers right in the budget documents themselves. There is the projected amount of money we will spend in this fiscal year on public debt charges. That is just the interest to service our current national debt, which is about $1.4 trillion. The number is getting so high that we are into the trillions now. It costs $55 billion a year just in interest payments to service that debt. That is all the GST collected in the country. It does not go to health care. It does not go to roads. It does not go to housing. It does not go to fixing our broken bureaucracy. It does not go to improving service at the CRA. Every dollar in GST that is collected in the country goes to paying the interest on our debt.
If we look at the projections, it is $55.6 billion this year, and it is projected, over the next five years, to go up to $76.1 billion. The Liberals will be adding $320 billion more to our national debt over the course of the next five years. Most Canadians can look at that and say that if we keep adding and adding to our credit card with no plan to pay it off, that is not sustainable. That is exactly what we are seeing here with the Liberal budget.
A key part of the budget is homebuilding. We have a real problem in the country with getting homes built and affordable homes built.
I want to take this opportunity to bring up, as all politics is local, the local context from Stormont—Dundas—Glengarry, where it was just reported at a Cornwall city council meeting in the last month that, according to the deputy CAO, Cornwall today is “at a standstill”. That is the quote it used.
In a city of 47,000 people, here is where the housing situation and housing starts stand. Only 12 building permits for houses and seven for duplexes have been issued in the city of Cornwall since May. That goes to show that buyers cannot buy, sellers cannot sell and, most importantly, builders cannot build. There are so many Canadians looking for home ownership and looking for new homes. We desperately need millions of new homes just to keep up with demand for affordability.
Right in my proud part of eastern Ontario, we have a very sad circumstance where, at the end of the day, only 19 building permits for houses and duplexes have been issued since May. It is a serious problem. The Liberals keep announcing billions and billions of dollars. They keep creating new bureaucracies. Their latest one is Build Canada Homes. It is another bureaucracy that is adding administrative paperwork and red tape, not actually cutting it.
Here is a fact about how proud the Liberals pretend to be about their housing programs. Their housing accelerator fund has failed badly in eastern Ontario. With red tape, municipalities like Cornwall, local townships in S, D and G and, more importantly, Cornwall and S, D and G housing services are banned from even being able to apply for funding. It has been years. The government has known about this but has not acted. It is blocking our communities from getting our fair share. Not only do we see slow housing starts in Cornwall, but we are seeing an inability for our city and the united counties of S, D and G to apply for help from the Liberal government.
It is failure after failure, but there is a solution I want to highlight. Our positive, constructive Conservative solution has gotten excellent feedback from builders that desperately want to get more shovels in the ground. The Liberals have a lot of half-baked measures. They are only taking the GST off of new homes for first-time homebuyers. As we can see by the stats in Cornwall and across the country, we need to unlock more potential.
What do we need to do? What Conservatives are proposing we do is a game-changer. It is a bold plan to take the GST off all new homes in Canada of up to $1.3 million. That is going to save the average Canadian homeowner up to $65,000. Not only that, but they will save money instantly on the purchase of their house up front, and they will save because they will not have to borrow as much. They could save roughly $3,000 a year in mortgage costs, further helping homes become more affordable in every part of this country.
The experts who analyzed our plan say that not only is it a good one, but it is going to go even further. It is going to boost the number of new homes built each year, sparking an extra 36,000 new homes built in Canada, and it is going to raise an extra $2.5 billion in income tax revenue from trades workers and home builders at a time when we desperately need all of that.
I am proud to stand on the floor to localize the frustrating challenges we have when it comes to homebuilding in the city of Cornwall, but also to highlight the constructive solutions we will be tabling, which are absent from the costly credit card budget of the Liberals. We have opposed this budget because the deficits are extremely high and there are the same old broken approaches when it comes to housing.
I often get asked what I would do to lower expenses. As spending by the Liberal government is out of control, what would I save money on?
There are two points I want to highlight very quickly. One is about trying to find the intelligence and reasoning behind why the Liberals decided, when they have an $80-billion deficit with no plans to balance the budget, to send $500 million to the European Space Agency. At a time when 2.2 million people are using food banks and people are struggling to get by, we are sending half a billion dollars over to Europe to send to space. We are creating European jobs at a time when we need Canadian jobs, with a 6.9% unemployment rate.
The second point I want to highlight when it comes to wasting taxpayers' money is the continued boondoggle of the $742-billion gun grab from law-abiding, legal, trained and tested firearms owners in this country. We have to look no further than Cape Breton, where the pilot of the failed public safety minister shows his failures continue. He had a pilot in Cape Breton, and reports say that as few as 22 firearms were collected from it. Nevertheless, the Liberals want to spend $742 million, which the minister even admitted on leaked audio would not work, as the pilot does not target the people we need to go after: the criminals and gun smugglers in this country. Right there is $1 billion in savings just by using a little common sense when it comes to the budget.
I want to wrap up my comments by acknowledging the many incredible people across S, D and G who are doing their part to help people in challenging times. I have spoken before about the Agape Centre in Cornwall, and now I want to highlight the amazing work the House of Lazarus is doing in Mountain. I had the privilege, as always, of talking with Cathy Ashby, the executive director, and her team there. They have seen a 100% increase in food bank use since 2019. It is not slowing down; it is only getting worse. The summer period alone this year has seen a 45% increase in food bank use. They now serve over 850 people.
It is Canadians like those who volunteer and work at the House of Lazarus who are going to help us get through this challenge. I am proud of their work. I am proud of the great things they are doing to try help people in need in S, D and G.