Madam Speaker, there are times in the life of a Parliament when Canadians are not looking for showy speeches, sound bites for TikTok or corporate buzzwords. Sometimes people look to the House of Commons and wonder whether the people entrusted with power are listening to them, are able to understand them, and are making efforts to solve the real problems in their lives.
Canadians are exhausted. They are tired not because they do not want to work, but because they bear too heavy a load on their shoulders for a government that does not take enough responsibility. The government we have now is too much of a burden. It weighs heavily on the shoulders of the ordinary—no, the extraordinary Canadians who work every day to pay our country's bills. These are people whose names never appear in the credits. They never get famous, but they are the ones building our country, and it is to them that we owe our presence here in the House of Commons. For too long, the government has taken them for granted, taking their money to spend on its own obsessions without delivering any benefits for them.
There are moments in a nation's life when people look to our leaders, not for applause lines, corporate buzzwords or social media clips, but for honesty, humility and seriousness. They look to this chamber and ask whether those entrusted with power truly understand the weight of the burdens on the shoulders of the people.
Now is one of those times, because Canadians are tired. They are exhausted, not because they do not want to work but because they bear the burden of an extremely expensive government that takes too much and returns too little, that focuses on its own obsessions rather than on the needs of the people who pay the bills.
Those Canadians who pay the bills, the ordinary Canadians, no, the extraordinary Canadians who build the homes, swing the hammers, frame our buildings, drive our trucks, invest in our businesses and mortgage their homes to start new enterprises are the silent voices whose murmurs of pain and suffering have grown louder and louder without any heed from government.
They needed hope yesterday. They needed relief. They needed evidence that someone in the government had heard them, believed them and respected their sacrifices and was finally prepared to act in their interests instead of the government's interests. Instead, they were met with the most expensive failure in modern Canadian history. The Prime Minister, the figure head the Liberals had paraded in front of Canadians as a new guarantor of discipline, competence and stability, the man we were told would clean up the Liberal mess, has brought a bigger shovel and dug a far deeper hole.
For nearly a year, the Liberals and their supporters told us that the Prime Minister was different from the man he had advised for the proceeding five years, that he was smarter and more responsible and that he would be the adult in the room. However, even before the budget was presented, the promises were all broken.
It was revealed that the mythology was false, because this budget confirms the truth: In the government, there is no discipline, restraint or plan, only politics, posturing and pain for the people who do the work, pay the taxes and hold the country together.
The numbers speak for themselves. The Prime Minister is going to add another $80 billion to our national debt, which is double the deficit Justin Trudeau left behind. It is the largest deficit in the country's history, outside of the pandemic. That is $16 billion more than the deficit the Prime Minister promised during the election campaign. That is about $5,000 for every Canadian family. These families will be paying the bill for generations to come, and that is just the debt he is adding in a single year.
The budget calls for $312 billion to be added to the debt over five years. That is a record and by far the largest amount in the country's history. It represents $20,000 in additional debt for every Canadian family.
The Prime Minister is proving to be the most expensive in Canadian history, with a $78.3-billion deficit. His deficit is twice the size of the one Trudeau left behind. It is also $16 billion bigger than he promised, the biggest by far outside the COVID period. Over the five years that follow this budget, the Prime Minister expects to add $314 billion of new debt. That is one-third of a trillion dollars, which is $20,000 for every family in Canada.
Let us think about that. We were told that the adults were finally here, but instead the bill payers of this country are being told to brace for yet another reckless round of spending: $10 million of new debt added every single hour. Canadians are trimming their groceries, delaying having children, moving in with their parents and taking on second jobs, while the government indebts them $10 million an hour. That is not for homes, for prosperity or for any benefit of the people, but for the survival of the government itself.
Where does this indulgence take us? The national debt is now $1.35 trillion. To put that into perspective, that is by far the highest in Canadian history. A newborn child in this country is born with $30,000 of debt to their name, and for a family of four, it is $120,000 of debt. That is a small mortgage for most people, and that is just the debt they owe through the federal government.
Let me be clear: Every Canadian family owes $120,000 as a result of the national debt, at the federal level alone.
Our young people are told they have to put their dreams on hold to pay this crushing burden. What do they get for it? Do they get more doctors, more nurses, more homes or more paycheques? No, they get none of the above.
The money goes to interest on the debt, on which the government is now spending $55.6 billion. That is more than we transfer for health care to the provinces and more than the government collects in GST. When someone pays GST on their next purchase, they should know that every penny is going to paying bankers and bondholders rather than to paying nurses and doctors. That is the human cost.
Every year, Canadian families spend $3,300 on interest for the federal debt alone. That money will not fund a single MRI machine. It will be waste layered upon waste. While Canadians tighten their belt, eat lower-quality food and less of it, and hold off on their dreams, the Liberals offer one thing in return: decline disguised as virtue.
The Liberals promised that the debt-to-GDP ratio would fall; it rises. The Prime Minister promised that confidence would return and that investment would return, but then his own budget graph shows that investment is actually collapsing in real time. Every single quarter that he has been in office in this calendar year, there will have been a serious decline in investment: so much for spending less and investing more.
The Liberals promised stability; they delivered stagnation. They promised the next generation a fair shot; they have delivered them a sentence of slow growth and high costs. That might sound like economist-speak, but there is a real human cost of that.
As Canadians walk into grocery stores, they see that since March, when the Prime Minister was elected on the promise that he would be judged by the prices at the grocery store, strawberries are up 25%, beef sirloin is up 25%, stewing beef is up 20%, coffee is up 20%, chicken drumsticks are up 17%, salad dressing is up 17%, pork ribs are up 15%, chicken thighs are up 14%, and even basic mushrooms are up 13%.
Canadians are not eating gourmet; in fact, many of them are not eating at all some days. A recent survey and study done by a food bank association demonstrated that over 10% of Canadians are now skipping meals for an entire day because they cannot afford to eat. Food bank usage tells the story: It has doubled since 2019, when the Prime Minister became the economic adviser to his predecessor.
One in five Canadians who goes to a food bank has a job, but their paycheque does not buy them food. In addition, while the Liberals keep telling us they are going to bring in a school food program, since they made that promise, the number of children relying on food banks has doubled, to 700,000 a month.
Hanging over every farm, every factory, every trucker who moves goods, and every person who has anything in a modern civilized life is the massive and growing industrial carbon tax. Yes, it is still there. It is true the government has paused the visible, consumer carbon tax, thanks to Conservative pressure, but it has maintained, and in this budget has decided to increase, the industrial carbon tax, which punishes people who produce food and those who build homes.
The food professor warned that the industrial carbon tax is not gone; the worst part is still there. Only the consumer portion was reduced to zero. Processors and growers shoulder heavy costs. He said that the industrial carbon tax remains and that we should pay attention, because it continues to erode competitiveness in the agri-food sector. Most damning of all is that he says, “The U.S. produces food more efficiently and more cheaply than we do. The cost gap is growing, not shrinking.”
When experts are practically begging the government to stop harming food production with high taxes on every aspect of the food chain, this is a matter of ideology, not of human need.
Let us be very clear what this tax actually is; it is a levy on the steel in the tractor that rolls across our fields. Every grain dryer that preserves and dries the harvest, every greenhouse heater that helps vegetables grow in the winter, every truck that ships food from farm to table, every bag of fertilizer, every pallet of lumber, every sack of cement, every pound of steel, every piece of rebar, every roofing truss and every load of drywall becomes more expensive when we apply a carbon tax on the things Canadians make.
It might be a well-concealed tax, but it is an extremely expensive tax, one the Prime Minister plans to more than double over the next several years and keep increasing even after that. It is no wonder that the government is actually increasing food prices in Canada at a faster rate than they are increasing in the United States.
It is not just food; it is also housing. The industrial carbon tax applies on everything for housing. To give a little bit of chump change back to a very small number of people who happen to meet the exact and highly limited definition, the government has provided an unworkable GST rebate, going only to first time buyers who buy new homes.
Here is the problem with that: The Venn diagram intersection of new buyer and new home is next to nothing. New buyers typically buy resale homes, and those never had taxes on them in the first place. Typically, new homes are bought by second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-time homebuyers, because, of course, new homes are more expensive, and buyers already have to have been in the market.
The Prime Minister has successfully engineered a rebate that 95% of Canadians are ineligible to receive. It is basically worthless to almost all people in the country. Meanwhile, he made a promise he would help the municipalities cut their development taxes in half. That promise goes unkept, so today in the province of Ontario, 30% of the cost of a new home is taxes and more taxes, and the Prime Minister has not removed or eliminated those taxes despite the promise he made during the election.
Scott Andison, chief executive officer of the Ontario Home Builders' Association says, "The government's inaction will put 40,000 jobs in Ontario at risk. From architects and engineers to trades and sub trades across the residential construction sector, the estimated direct and indirect economic impact from these job losses on Ontario's economy is $5.3 billion.”
Meanwhile, our tradespeople are losing their jobs because homes are not getting built. Homebuilding is collapsing after the Prime Minister promised he would double it. Yesterday's budget makes the problem worse by failing to remove the taxes that were already there, while piling on the new and more expensive industrial carbon tax.
What is most galling of all is the wordplay the Liberals use to justify it all. They say, “We're not spending; we're investing”. This sounds like a new buzzword, but it is actually very old. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claimed that he was going to invest when he promised a small deficit of $10 billion that would be gone in three years. Do members remember that? He said that the budget would balance itself.
I do not say that derisively, because he actually had a well-thought-out chain of steps that he believed would happen. He said that if we borrow money and spend it in the economy, it will cause economic growth and investment that will then go back into tax revenues, and the budget will balance itself. He did not express it in those sorts of terms, but that is what he meant, and that is exactly what the Prime Minister today is promising; he is claiming that deficits can be converted into investment. Well, there are three reasons that never happens.
By the way, members do not have to take my word for it; the investment numbers themselves are clear. Since the government started new debt, investment in Canada has collapsed. We have had the worst investment per capita of any country in the G7 and its worst drop in Canadian history as the Liberals have doubled deficits.
Therefore there is a negative correlation between deficits and investments. Why is that? First, everything comes from something; nothing comes from nothing. Governments get deficit financing only two ways: They print it, or they borrow it.
If they print it, they increase the money supply faster than the things money buys, and we get inflation, which we have seen; or they borrow it out of the marketplace, but somebody has to lend it, meaning that the money that is lent to the government cannot be put to other more productive uses. Economists call it the crowding out effect; this is when government borrows money out of the economy, depriving the private sector of the investment it needs for more productive activities.
Therefore when government borrows out of the economy in order to spend back into the economy, there is no net increase in economic activity; it is simply redirected to another purpose, away from productive private sector investment towards unproductive government spending. Money is taken away from factories, pipelines, warehouses, tech research and other income-generating assets to give it to bureaucracy, which ultimately devours the money and never produces a return.
The most incredible example of this was, of course, in Israel, which was running massive deficits in the 1990s and paying out 6% interest on its government bonds. This starved the Israeli economy of investment. When the government finally stopped spending and balanced its budget, investment in the tech sector exploded, because bondholders were forced to actually invest in productive R and D rather than passively hand their money over for a government-guaranteed return.
As a result of paying down debt, Israel unlocked more investment, and there was a venture capital boom that meant that right now, Israel has more companies trading on the NASDAQ exchange than does all of Europe, a continent with 75 times more people than Israel.
If we want to unlock investment, one of the things we need to stop doing is borrowing that investment out of the economy. Instead, we need to leave it in the hands of productive private sector investment that will grow and expand our economy.
The second reason why deficits are not investments is that today's deficits are perceived as tomorrow's taxes, and every business and citizen knows that. When people see large deficits in the news, they anticipate future tax increases and begin to save accordingly. Therefore, while the government is injecting funds into the economy, consumers, investors and businesses are reducing their own spending and investment.
The reason the government's deficits do not produce more investment and economic activity as well is that people are not stupid. They know today's deficits are tomorrow's taxes, so businesses and individuals tend to hoard their money in anticipation of future tax increases when they see there are large-scale deficits in the present. This has been borne out by the research of the IMF, which found that high-debt countries, such as Canada, with high deficits tend to have households holding back on investments of their own, and the same goes for businesses.
The only reason money-making projects do not happen in Canada is not because we are not spending and borrowing enough money, but because the government is standing in the way of those very same projects. What it needs to do is get out of the way.
The government needs to get out of the way to let mines be dug in two years' or three years' approval time, get out of the way to approve pipelines that can go to the coast so we no longer have to give all of our oil to Americans at discounts and get out of the way to grant rapid permits for LNG plants, the massive plants that are $30 billion or $40 billion, totally funded by the private sector, and massively profitable, because the price for a million metric British thermal units in Canada is three dollars, while in Asia it is over $10.
We can make enormous amounts of money if the government gets out of the way and lets these things happen, but of course that would be no fun for the government. Nobody wants written on their tombstone, “Here lies politician Smith. He got out of the way.” They all want to say that he built this thing and he built that thing, with other people's money, so it serves the ego of the politician to take the money out of the economy and put it back somewhere else, even though it costs enormous amounts, or to block this economic activity only to subsidize that same economic activity.
It is like what the great President Ronald Reagan said, which is that, if Liberals see something move, they tax it. If it keeps moving, they regulate it. If it stops moving, they subsidize it. Why not just do none of the above? Why not just get out of the way to let free people, entrepreneurs and workers, unlock their incredible natural potential to build, make, move, fix, develop and invent things for all of us? That would be a much more sensible way to get investment.
The Liberals have offered us nothing but managed declined, but we want national renewal. They have offered excuses, while we, as Conservatives, offer results. They offer debt and drift; we offer discipline and direction. They offer scarcity; we offer possibility. They offer a failed past; we offer a bright future. They trust only in themselves to run the lives of other people; we trust in the Canadian people to make their own decisions for themselves.
We, as Conservatives, want to get the government out of the way. We want to lighten the load on our entrepreneurs and our workers in order to unleash the strength and ingenuity of Canadians. We want to allow them to be rewarded for their ambition.
That is the country we want, and we have a very clear plan to do it. We want to lower the taxes on work, investment, homebuilding and energy. Let us cut income taxes for real, not $83 a year, but a real income tax cut that would actually boost take-home pay and reward hard work. Let us get rid of taxes on energy, such as the industrial carbon tax. Let us get rid of all taxes on homebuilding, which would be enough to reduce homebuilding costs in some provinces by as much as $200,000. Let us get rid of taxes on investment. If we want more investment, stop taxing investment. No capital gains tax for anybody who reinvests in Canada would be a way to get lots of investment going.
We need to unlock and reward the entrepreneurship of this country, but right now our entrepreneurs are like eagles locked in a birdcage. They cannot go anywhere because they are hemmed in and blocked from flying by high government taxes and heavy regulatory burden. We want to liberate Canadians to spread their economic wings and fly.
We want this to be the most rewarding place for people to work, start a business, build a home, dig a mine and set up a factory to make stuff again. That is the country we envision. We want sound money so that when hard-working waitresses and assembly line workers get their paycheque and put it in their bank account, it does not lose its value with each passing day. That means we have to stop the violence the government is doing to our money, stop the money printing and get the Bank of Canada back to its job of core low inflation and ultimately address the real foundational problem, which is that the government is spending money it does not have on things we do not need. Let us control the government's spending so that Canadian people can have strong, sound money again.
The Liberals wants a country where the government is rich and the people are poor. We want the people to live with abundance and opportunity, and that, by the way, means we need to unlock energy. There has been no history in the world of defeating poverty that has not involved low-cost and abundant energy. We, on the Conservative side, want to unlock the trillions of dollars of oil and gas, uranium and hydroelectricity in our water, our rocks, our molecules and our atoms to be used for our benefit here in a sovereign and strong Canada. That is our vision.
This is a bright and optimistic vision, and it is one that I think is going to inspire our young people, who are in so desperate need of hope. I want to say to our youth today that we, as Conservatives, see them. We see the heavy bags under their eyes as they work that third shift in a single day or are dropping off Uber Eats because they need it to pay the rent. We hear the stress and the strain in their voices as they wonder how they are going to pay the rent. We also hear the tone of hopelessness as they wonder whether they will ever be able to start a family. We hear them. We see them. We are with them. We are here to offer them homes, jobs and hope.
Our young people will once again be rewarded for their ambition, their hard work, their ingenious activity and their contribution to our country. Their hard work will once again be liberated to their own benefit and to the benefit of all Canadians. We are not here to tell our youth, who have done nothing but sacrifice since their teenage years, that they need to sacrifice more at the alter of a costly, confiscatory and expensive Liberal government. The hard work of our young people should go to their benefit. This should be a land of promise, freedom and opportunity for our youth.
We reiterate that what this country needs is an affordable budget for an affordable life for all of our people, in a country that rewards hard work and unlocks entrepreneurs, a nation not of bureaucrats and busybodies, of rulers and rule-makers, of gatekeepers and grandees, but instead, a nation of adventurers and artists, of entrepreneurs and explorers, of workers and warriors, of pioneers and patriots, all united to restore the promise of Canada, which is that anyone from anywhere can do anything and that hard work gets people a great life on a safe street in a beautiful house under our proud flag.
Canada first. Canada forever.
