Mr. Speaker, I have witnessed a number of budgets over my 20-year parliamentary career. Some of them were good, such as the first 10, and some of them have been pretty bad, which are the ones since then.
What makes a bad budget? Generally, it is a Liberal. To the average Canadian, a bad budget may be one that fails to balance what one wants with what one needs and leads to a shortfall. A bad budget leaves one open to unpredictability and makes it difficult to adapt to changing circumstances. In contrast, a good budget allows one to address current needs but still have some money left over to plan for the future. It allows people to invest in the things their families need the most. We can classify these kinds of budgets as either a responsible budget or an irresponsible budget.
These same budgetary patterns can be observed in Parliament, usually following along party lines. My time in the Harper government showed me what a responsible budget actually looked like, while my time in opposition has taught me what an irresponsible budget looks like. Those irresponsible budgets were usually presented by the Liberal Party, the Liberal government, and mostly Justin Trudeau. They all had varying degrees of severity. One could argue that, under the last prime minister, this level of carelessness reached new heights. These were, for all intents and purposes, tax-and-spend, NDP-style budgets that turned our national debt into a national albatross burden around our neck. That burden has become an ever-increasing liability.
Our federal debt has reached over $1.28 trillion. That is $1,280 billion, which is an incomprehensibly large sum to the average person. For context, when the St. Lawrence Seaway was constructed in 1959, which is one of the most important infrastructure projects in our history, it cost $470 million, or nearly $5 billion in today's currency. I do not believe we have received the same economic benefits as the seaway for much of this new debt over the last 10 years. In fact, the Liberals have doubled the national debt in this country in the last 10 years, and I cannot think of a single significant nation-building infrastructure project that we received for that money.
The debt is so large, it is now impacting our finances. In 2025, Canada's federal government is projected to spend approximately $54 billion on servicing just our debt. That is nearly as much as the $54.5 billion spent on the federal health transfers to our provinces. Our debt is so large now that servicing the debt is equivalent to one of the core functions of our government, yet the government keeps wasting money on vanity projects such as its current gun grab, which will not do anything at all to address public safety. We know this to be true because the minister said so when he thought no one was listening. He basically said it was all to get votes in certain parts of the country.
If members do not believe me, if the Liberals do not want to believe me, they can just ask the Toronto Police Association, which just today put out a tweet saying that the confiscation program is “ineffective” and asking the government to instead use that money toward funding frontline policing.
Over the past 10 years, we have witnessed budget after budget of ballooning deficits. The prime minister who presented those atrocious budgets then resigned, a good riddance. The man who replaced that prime minister, the member for Nepean, told Canadians that he was the so-called reasonable guy. He said that he and only he could address Canada's challenges. He said he would be more fiscally responsible than his predecessor. He promised economic prosperity. He said that he was best qualified to deal with President Donald Trump, yet with his first budget, which was delivered late, of course, and I am very much looking forward to the fall economic statement in April, we see he is not the man he said he was.
The budget is nothing short of reckless, and it is proof that he misrepresented himself to the Canadian electorate in the spring. With a projected deficit of $78.3 billion, this budget gets us nowhere closer to reaching fiscal balance. To add insult to injury, no trade deal with the United States has materialized.
For those listening at home, I want to give a snapshot of what is happening here in Ottawa. The Liberals have created generational debt over the last decade under the banner of generational investments, yet these investments have not paid off. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has indicated that GDP growth is stagnant and will remain below 2% for the remainder of the decade. This will make it difficult to manage rising debt levels.
The previous fiscal dogma espoused by the previous finance minister was that our debt-to-GDP ratio was a marker of fiscal sustainability. We disagreed. We thought they were spending too much money. Remarkably, the new finance minister has presented a budget that will grow our debt-to-GDP ratio rather than shrink it.
How can we grow our way out of a crisis if our debt is growing proportionally faster than our economic growth? We are robbing a future generation of Canadians of their wealth to shore up our present economic frustrations and considerations. This is the same generation that is already struggling to pay for food, pay off their student loans or even buy a house and start a family. We should be ashamed of the debt we are leaving to future generations. More worrisome still is the fact that the the Parliamentary Budget Officer has stated that the Prime Minister has “limited room to cut taxes” as the debt-to-GDP ratio continues to grow.
When I spoke of households and budgets, I said that a good budget allows for some manoeuverability. This idea of being able to pivot in a crisis is paramount for governments of all political stripes, yet by stripping our cupboards bare of essentials over the past ten years, we have left ourselves as a nation very vulnerable. In plain language, we are lacking the fiscal discipline to pivot in a crisis. Furthermore, our economic woes have created a culture of dependency in which the economy is now reliant on the government and not the other way around.
Business needs certainty and a reliable fiscal environment to thrive, yet under the Liberal government, Canada has anything but. To get anything built in this country, one must navigate an intricate web of bureaucracy. This has created a situation in which businesses are fearful of taking the risks they should not be afraid of taking. As a result, they are not investing in Canada.
A recent OECD report indicates that the Canadian business landscape is currently facing a significant challenge due to lack of investment. For example, Canada invests less in machinery and equipment than other OECD countries. Furthermore, the investment gap between Canada and the U.S. has widened at a time when our neighbour down south is waging a trade war against us.
I would like to conclude by asking members and all Canadians this very simple question. Passing a budget is an act of stewardship. It is about being disciplined today so that we have a brighter tomorrow. A Greek proverb reads, “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.” To think of the future is to be altruistic. If we are to be honest with ourselves, do we want our children and our grandchildren to inherit the economic future that we have right now, or do we want to gift them with a flourishing economy in which they can prosper, buy a home and invest in their families?
I know the residents of Ponoka—Didsbury very well, and I see the frustration on their faces. I see the frustration in the faces of the young people in their twenties and thirties who are still living at home, who wish they could buy a home in central Alberta. I see the frustration in my friends and colleagues of my generation who started very successful and prosperous businesses in the oil and gas sector, just to watch those businesses disappear and go bankrupt and watch all of their assets disappear over the last ten years because of a government that simply does not understand the consequences of the actions it has taken.
I would submit that had the government not cancelled the northern gateway pipeline, the energy east pipeline and all but one of the various LNG export terminals on both the east and west coasts of this country, that Canada would be in a better position today. For one pipeline and one LNG export terminal, it would take approximately 10 years to build each of them.
Could members imagine the fiscal power that this country would have right now if we unleashed the potential of our natural resources? As an Albertan, I know very well what our contribution is, as 10% of the population contributes 15% to 16% of the GDP to this country, because we have a different attitude. One where the government does not control everything we do and we unleash the potential of our entrepreneurs, investors and workers to do the things that build our country and make it great.
Until the government retracts and repeals the legislation that has stymied this development, we are going to be in the same place where just Liberals, and Liberals alone, get to decide what happens in Canada. It is like living with the mafia.