Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address Bill C-15, the first budget implementation act. The budget was introduced after Canadians were made to wait well over a year to understand the fiscal reality the Liberal government put them in after 10 years.
Canadians are facing a harsh and worsening reality. When they open their wallets, they see less money and fewer opportunities. They are met with promises from a government that insists a few more billion dollars in Ottawa spending will magically resolve their struggles. The same government believes the same ideas are going to fix its messes: spend more, borrow more and add bureaucracy. Every time, it makes the situation worse.
I stand here representing the great people of Red Deer, Alberta, to tell the government my constituents have had enough. They have had enough of the 10 long Liberal years that continue to add inflationary spending to the already ballooned national debt left by Justin Trudeau.
Speaking of Justin Trudeau, as prime minister, he spent more of Canadians' hard-earned dollars than all other prime ministers in the history of Canada combined. Today, the current Prime Minister is well on his way to eclipsing the unfortunate milestone set by his predecessor.
Budget 2025 is not a blueprint for prosperity. It is a blueprint for more government intervention, more centralized planning and more top-down bureaucracy.
Just six months ago, the Prime Minister claimed he would restore discipline and fiscal credibility. Instead, the budget revealed a sharp departure from those commitments. What do Canadians have to show for it? They have a federal debt standing at nearly $1.3 trillion; $141 billion in new spending; a $78.3-billion deficit in 2025-26 alone, which has ballooned from $62 billion; an affordability crisis in which housing costs have doubled and food, fuel and necessities are out of reach for many; GDP stagnation to only 1% between 2014 and 2024; and a lower standard of living.
According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the federal debt-to-GDP ratio in budget 2025 is projected to be higher compared to the 2024 FES and is no longer projected to be on a declining path over the medium term. The federal government's own so-called debt-to-GDP fiscal anchor has been abandoned. The government promised to help municipalities cut homebuilding taxes in half. The budget breaks that promise and locks in higher housing costs.
Meanwhile, Canada is mired in a productivity crisis of its own. Just days ago, the deputy governor of the Bank of Canada stated that we are stuck in a “vicious” cycle of “weak productivity.”
He further stated:
A certain level of regulation is essential, of course. But it’s fair to ask if we could regulate better. This could mean speeding up approval processes, re-evaluating the scope of some rules and reducing the overall uncertainty around regulation. We also need to address overlap, redundancies and contradictions between the different levels of government.
This is not some partisan Conservative attack. This is a government official in an institution tasked with setting the monetary policy of the government, which is something the Prime Minister should know well enough about.
Canadians expect economic stability, yet StatsCan shows the economy weakening rapidly. GDP grew by only 1.1% in the past year, for the second-lowest growth in the G7. Canada has lost more than 27,000 manufacturing jobs in the past year. Business insolvencies are up 35% year over year, which is the highest increase since the eighties. Wages are falling in real terms, with young workers experiencing the sharpest declines. Core inflation remains above 3%, and food inflation continues to rise month after month.
When parents in Red Deer wake up every morning, too often they are forced to wonder whether their paycheques will be enough to cover their rent or whether they will be able to put healthy, nutritious food on the table for their families. In March 2025 alone, there were 2.2 million visits to food banks across Canada, the highest number ever recorded.
In Alberta, 36% of food bank visits were for children. Even more troubling, employment income accounts for the largest share of income sources among food bank visitors, 31% of all visits. That means that fewer Albertans even have the means to donate to food banks to help their neighbours in need.
Let us talk housing. The government stole the dream of home ownership from an entire generation of young Canadians. Canadians were told that homes would be built at a scale and speed not seen in generations. What did the budget do? It created another bureaucratic organization and less action. The agency promised to immediately cut development charges in half. That has gone unfulfilled, and CMHC confirmed in October that housing starts are down 17%.
Young Canadians want to start a family and to be able to live the life they were promised after they were educated and have worked hard, but now they find it impossible to get ahead. This is the first generation in decades that has a lower standard of living than their parents and their grandparents did, and the government believes that bringing in more immigration will fix the problem. While Canadians are stuck without support to start and grow their own family, mass immigration into this country has played a major part in the affordability crisis, robbing Canadians of prosperity in their own country. It is simple: More people taking up more infrastructure, health care capacity, housing and government subsidies means less availability for Canadians already here.
It is not the fault of people coming to Canada under a false promise of a better life from a government without a plan for them. For decades, immigration with proper integration has shaped our communities and helped forge who we are as a nation. Indeed, it is the government's own doing of rapidly expanding our migration numbers without ensuring our institutions can handle it that has both collapsed Canadian confidence in our immigration system and led to the fracturing of communities across our country.
For example, over the past number of weeks, we have heard over and over again at the health committee that not one health care body was consulted on immigration levels to ensure that our health care system could handle them. If the people working to keep Canadians healthy do not even have a say on how many people they can treat, how can they be expected to care for millions more on top of their burden? Well, they were expected to, and the government said, “too bad”.
Over 6.5 million Canadians are without a family doctor, and the nursing shortage is expected to exceed 100,000 nurses by 2030. Meanwhile, there are 80,000 foreign-trained health care professionals who came to this country to work in our health care system but are not able to do so. Again, government red tape and bureaucracy have made it impossible, but instead of integrating the health care professionals who are already here in Canada, the government wants to repeat the same mistake and bring in more. This is not sustainable.
All of this adds up, and somebody eventually has to pay the bill. It is simply unfair to pass on responsibility for today's reckless spending to our future generations while the government repeats the same mistakes of the past decade that led us to the problem. The government should be looking to unleash the power of Canadian ingenuity and industry; set the standards for growth; get out of the way; and incentivize the free market, not be the main driver of a centralized economy, or worse, make the conditions of a free market impossible to grow so that government is the only answer.
Canada has limitless potential if only the government would not see itself as the main character but as a supporting act to the Canadians who power it. Approve energy development, restore investor confidence, reform project approvals, expand our industries and get out of the way.
The people of Red Deer will not accept the irresponsibility of the budget. They demand and deserve better. They want action and real progress, not just the illusion of something happening, with more talk and announcements. I will always stand here to be their voice against a government that has silenced them.
Conservatives will always fight for Canadian families and Canadian workers. I urge the government to start doing the same.