Debates of Nov. 6th, 2025

Financial Statement of Minister of Finance

[Giovanna Mingarelli, Liberal, Prescott—Russell—Cumberland, ON]

Mr. Speaker, our government is doing a lot to support the fight against climate change. I am very proud of everything we are doing in that regard.

[Burton Bailey, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Mr. Speaker, for young people trying to build their life and start a family, the Liberals have erased the hope of ever owning their own home. What is their solution? It is more government, more bureaucracy and more of the same problems. The Prime Minister told young people they must suffer.

My question for the member is this: Why did the Liberal government not listen to the Conservatives? We suggested eliminating the GST on all home sales up to $1.3 million and cutting development charges to get homes built.

[Giovanna Mingarelli, Liberal, Prescott—Russell—Cumberland, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the government is doing a lot to support affordable housing, including the Build Canada Homes fund, which is providing billions of dollars in funding to build sustainable homes, especially for the most vulnerable in society. I would invite the hon. member to consult the Build Canada Homes fund to explore all the great ways that Canadians, especially youth, are being supported by the initiative.

[Shannon Miedema, Liberal, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I was pleased to see that this budget includes funding to support francophone communities across the country, including Acadians. Funding for National Acadian Day festivities has been doubled and made permanent.

Could my hon. colleague talk to us about the importance of supporting the francophonie, not only in her riding, but across Canada?

[Giovanna Mingarelli, Liberal, Prescott—Russell—Cumberland, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for this excellent question.

I am very proud that new funds are being allocated to support National Acadian Day. I think it is very important for all communities across Canada to have access to funds to promote our francophone communities in every corner of this beautiful country. When we promote francophone festivals and culture, the effect is twofold, because we are also promoting official languages, which enrich our country.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, Kamloops—Shuswap—Central Rockies, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Richmond Centre—Marpole.

I rise today as the member elected by the citizens of Kamloops—Shuswap—Central Rockies, and I would be remiss if I did not take this opportunity to thank those constituents for the trust they have vested in me. Representing constituents is central to the work of all members. Through all the many demands and distractions we face as elected members, we must never forget that Canadians have vested their trust in us and chosen us to come to this place to be their advocates.

I was first elected to the House on October 19, 2015, some 10 years and 18 days ago. Who is counting, though? Suffice it to say that since then, much has changed for all of us and for Canada, but as it has been said, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

My first budget speech was on April 14, 2016 and I would like to share with the House some of the points from that budget speech, because they are indeed as relevant today to this debate as they were then. On that day nearly 500 weeks ago, I stood in the House and pressed the Liberal government on its broken promise of balancing the federal budget. Imagine that. In 2015, the Liberals campaigned on a promise to “return Canada to a balanced budget in [2019]”. It is a true story. It is on the public record. It was their 2015 election platform. It was a Liberal promise.

On April 14, 2016, I stood in the House and stated that budget 2016 was “completely silent on this promise and [was] vacant of any vision of returning our nation to a balanced budget. Surely, if the Liberals had a plan to deliver on their promise of a balanced budget in 2019, they would have put at least one line in their 269-page budget [2016]”.

However, they did not, and unfortunately for every Canadian paying taxes today and for decades to come, the Liberals' promise to balance the budget by 2019 was one of the first of many promises made to Canadians that was broken by the Liberals.

In my budget 2016 speech, I stated:

Sadly, the government appears to be dodging another promise it made to Canadians and has no plan on how to pay back this out-of-control borrowing and spending. The people of Canada want results from their government. The hard-working women and men of this nation, who go off to their jobs day in and day out, and their children are the ones who are now on the hook to repay this Liberal deficit.

Here we are, nine and a half years later, and my speech of 2016 is eerily relevant to today’s debate of budget 2025. The more things change, the more things remain the same.

Some of the hard-working men and women who went off to work at their jobs day in and day out, whom I spoke of in 2016, have transitioned to retirement, but others have not because they cannot afford to because of Liberal inflation. The children of those hard-working women and men who went off to their jobs day in and day out, whom I spoke of in 2016, have also been directly affected by Liberal failures.

Some of the children I spoke of in 2016 have lost their lives to the opioid crisis that has ravaged this nation, from big cities to small rural communities, because the Liberal government failed to cut off the illegal flow of narcotics and narcotic precursors into Canada. However, these government failures that allowed lives in Canada to be extinguished by illicit narcotics did not occur during times of scarce government funding.

No, the Liberal government failed to protect Canadians with better border inspection services and law enforcement, during a decade in which the Liberals spent more deficit dollars than all previous deficit dollars spent since Confederation. That is right: There has been more deficit in the last 10 years than there was in the previous 150 years.

Today, the same children of those hard-working women and men whom I spoke of in 2016 are facing housing scarcity and, again, it is not for lack of concurrent massive government spending. Budget 2025 is the 10th consecutive deficit budget from the Liberals, and every Liberal deficit budget over the past decade has contained allocations aimed at increasing housing for Canadians. However, the self-evident reality is that Liberal deficit budgets have collectively failed to unleash homebuilding in Canada.

As I stated in 2016, the hard-working women and men of this nation, who walk to their jobs day in and day out, and their children are now on the hook to repay this Liberal deficit. The reality is that, when the federal government spends, Canadians pay. Sadly, regardless of whether government allocations and investments pay off, ordinary and extraordinary Canadians still pay. Therefore, once again, the hard-working women and men of this nation and their children are the ones who are on the hook to repay another Liberal deficit.

As I mentioned at the beginning of my speech, we, as members of Parliament, must never forget that Canadians have vested their trust in us and chosen us to come to this place to be their advocates. When Canadians vest their trust in us, they expect a return on investment, and they deserve a return on investment. Canadians deserve value for their trust and value for the tax dollars that they have no choice but to pay, and it becomes increasingly difficult for Canadians to make the money they need to live and to pay the taxes to pay down the Liberal national debt.

In 2016, Trudeau's darling finance minister told Canadians to get used to so-called job churn, which is short-term employment and several career changes in a person's life. Well, even a blind squirrel finds an acorn from time to time, and in this instance the Liberal government was being honest with Canadians. Secure, stable, well-paying jobs are quickly disappearing across Canada, leaving Canadians to search for new careers, stalled in building nest eggs for retirement, delayed in buying a home and to only dream of one day being able to retire. This is the opposite of delivering citizens value for their investment of trust.

In my budget 2016 speech, I stated the following:

There is no plan for the government for balancing the budget, no plan for job creation, just a murky commitment and increasing public debt. The sad reality is that the budget falls short of the need for leadership that this nation requires.

Whether they are managing the finances of their households or businesses, Canadians understand and desire the values and notion of living within their means, handling their debt with prudence, and being disciplined and decisive in their spending. Unfortunately, the government is out of touch with Canadians in those regards.

My words from 2016 ring true today because the Liberal government has failed to connect unprecedented amounts of government spending with the plans and actions required to protect Canadians and communities from the threats and challenges that have only worsened and grown in number over the past decade. There is no shortage of pain and suffering across our nation today, so let us roll up our sleeves to get down to business to deliver results for the people who have vested their trust in us and in our ability to do so. We must be honest about what we are doing in this place, how it affects others and how it will affect them for decades. They are our fellow Canadians and communities who have vested their trust in each one of us.

Last, I would also be remiss if I did not mention that I now represent a riding with nearly 550 kilometres of Trans-Canada Highway. People travel this route daily for their jobs, and millions of dollars worth of goods pass through the mountain passes every day. Some parts of this highway have not seen major improvement since the Rogers Pass was completed in 1962, over 63 years ago today. The word “highway” is only mentioned three times in this budget: twice in historical context and once in reference to the north.

Canadians who have vested their trust in us and chosen us to come to this place to be their advocates deserve better. We cannot let them down.

[Marcus Powlowski, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives seem to have a great deal of trouble finding anything good in this budget. I would point out that, in the budget, there is $5 billion over seven years, starting in 2025-26, to Transport Canada to create the trade diversification corridor fund. I, too, have a large bit of the Trans-Canada Highway running through my riding.

Does the member not see a possibility that some of this money will go toward the Trans-Canada Highway and help his riding?

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, Kamloops—Shuswap—Central Rockies, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I certainly hope a portion of the spending will end up on that very incredible section of the Trans-Canada Highway that runs through Kamloops—Shuswap—Central Rockies. The way the Liberals operate, it may go to rich Liberal friends.

[Jean-Denis Garon, Bloc, Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance have invented this notion of considering a budget balanced on the basis of operational spending. Under the Minister of Finance's newly invented rules, the Trudeau government would have had a budget surplus in 2015‑16, followed by two years of balanced budgets, a surplus in 2018‑19, and a budget surplus the year after the pandemic.

If someone in the private sector were to calculate capital according to those rules, it would be considered accounting fraud. Not one chartered professional accountant in Canada, not one auditor, would sign off on these financial statements.

What does my colleague think about the fact that the Prime Minister and the minister tried to use this dishonest tactic to hide 58% of their deficit from the public even as they assert that money spent on a FIFA soccer game or on a program to identify potential investments counts as investment?

What does my colleague think about these fraudulent tactics?

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, Kamloops—Shuswap—Central Rockies, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would not dare say there is fraud or anything going on with the Liberal government. We are not allowed to say those kinds of things in the House.

The accounting practices of separating the capital spending from the operational spending is slight of hand. Someone may not pay attention to what is happening back here because I have them so busy with what is happening up here. It is trickery. I do not trust the government, any more than any other Canadian should, to balance the books or manage the taxes that come out of every Canadians' pocket to fund this massive deficit.

[Sandra Cobena, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we now know that the government is going to be abandoning the most important fiscal anchor, the debt-to-GDP ratio, which our allies use. Every serious country around the world uses it to guide itself.

Can the member speak to the seriousness of the fiscal anchor being abandoned and comment on why perhaps the government has chosen to do so?

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, Kamloops—Shuswap—Central Rockies, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for that very interesting question about debt-to-GDP ratios.

Anyone operating a business has to pay attention to their debt-to-net revenue ratio, otherwise they do not get to borrow from the banks, they do not get to borrow from anybody. I cannot believe the government is trying to pull the wool over Canadians' eyes by telling them not to worry about what it is doing because it says it is going to fix the books to make it look like Canada is doing well, and it is doing the opposite.

[Louis Villeneuve, Liberal, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Mr. Speaker, judging by what the opposition parties are saying, one would think there is absolutely nothing good in this budget, everything is wrong and nothing works.

Canada is facing a rapidly changing world that is more uncertain than ever, as we know. The rules-based international order and the trading system that powered Canada's prosperity for decades are being reshaped.

Our AAA credit rating is the top credit rating in the world. The debt-to-GDP ratio is the lowest in the G7, and the long-term interest rate is the lowest in the G7, despite the current situation.

Does my colleague agree that we need to work together?

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, Kamloops—Shuswap—Central Rockies, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is interesting that the member across the way talks about working together. That is what Conservatives have been trying to do. They have been trying to provide the Liberal government with ideas on how we can all work together as Canadians to bring down the debt so that we are not paying more in debt service costs than we are going to be paying in health care transfers and more in debt service costs than the GST is bringing in. That just does not make long-term fiscal sense.

We have a Prime Minister who fled England after destroying its economy. I do not want to see the same thing happen to Canada.

[Chak Au, Conservative, Richmond Centre—Marpole, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Northumberland—Clarke.

This year's federal budget is a masterpiece of illusion, a glossy presentation that looks generous on paper but hides a mountain of debt, higher taxes and fewer opportunities. Canadians plainly say the Liberal government is drawing bigger cakes, digging deeper holes and leaving endless debts. Every year, the government paints another picture of prosperity, another big cake of promises. They promise growth, affordability and opportunity, but those promises are baked with borrowed money, frosted with rhetoric and served with no plan to pay the bills. The Liberals call it investing in Canadians. Canadians see it for what it is: a revolving door of borrowed money and recycled failures.

Behind every new announcement lies another layer of debt, money borrowed from the next generation to mask today's problems. The government is not managing the economy; it is borrowing from the future to buy the illusion of progress. Deficits that were once called temporary have become structural. This budget adds $78 billion in new deficit spending, the costliest outside of COVID, and pushes total federal debt to $1.35 trillion. Interest payments on that debt will reach $55.6 billion next year, exceeding both the Canada health transfer and GST revenues.

Every dollar Canadians pay in GST now does not go to doctors and nurses but to bankers and bondholders. This is not fiscal stewardship; it is fiscal negligence disguised as compassion. When we add in provincial and municipal debts, Canadians now carry nearly $100,000 per person in combined public liabilities. This is the real legacy of 10 years of Liberal ideology: a revolving door of borrowing, spending and taxing that spins faster every year while Canadians fall further behind. This budget once again proves that the Liberals never met a tax they did not like.

Let me be blunt. This is Canadians' experience. When we earn money, we are taxed. When we spend money, we are taxed. When we save money, we are still taxed. Canadians now pay more and get less. Families are stretched to the breaking point. Young Canadians cannot afford homes. Seniors are cutting back on food and medication. Small businesses are drowning in payroll taxes and red tape. The Liberals claim they are helping the middle class, but what they are really doing is taxing the middle class to death. The only growth they have created is in government bureaucracy, debt and despair.

The Prime Minister made five clear commitments six months ago, and he has broken every single one. He promised to cap the deficit at $62 billion, but it is $78 billion. He promised to lower the debt-to-GDP ratio, but both debt and inflation are rising. He promised to spend less, but spending has ballooned by $90 billion, $5,400 per household. He promised to cut municipal homebuilding taxes, but housing costs are higher than ever. He promised to attract investment, but the Royal Bank of Canada confirms investment is collapsing. The government says it is building prosperity, but it is burning through it instead.

RBC's “High stakes, narrow margins” report warns that this budget bets everything on “investment-led growth”, a risky gamble that requires $500 billion in new private investment. RBC also notes that the fiscal anchors are thin and that only one-third of new spending is actually productive capital. The rest is political scaffolding: programs designed to look like investment but that function like subsidies.

We have seen this before. The government incubates companies with taxpayer grants, photo ops and headlines. Those firms thrive temporarily and then move to more competitive jurisdictions once the subsidies expire.

This is not industrial strategy; this is industrial babysitting. It is fuelled by the industrial carbon tax, which is a policy that drives up costs for farmers, manufacturers, miners and energy workers while pushing investment abroad. This tax alone adds billions in compliance costs each year, eroding competitiveness and feeding the inflation it claims to fight. The result is a self-perpetuating cycle, a revolving-door economy in which government taxes production, subsidizes dependency and calls it growth. Conservatives will scrap this destructive tax and replace ideology with innovation: practical environmental policy that rewards results, not rhetoric.

The same pattern repeats in public safety. The government announces more funding, yet crime keeps climbing because laws remain weak and accountability absent. It spends millions to process crime but refuses to stop it. Offenders walk free; victims lose faith, and enforcement is ordered to suppress the issue without resolving it. This is the revolving door of justice. It is a system that cycles offenders through courtrooms without consequences while communities are forced to bear the damages and pay the price out of their own pockets.

Conservatives will stop this. We will restore mandatory minimums for the worst crimes, use the notwithstanding clause where and when it is absolutely necessary and return the focus of justice to the protection of victims, not the accommodation of offenders.

This budget is more than a financial document; it is a mirror reflecting a government trapped by its own ideology. When confronted with failure, it does not change course. It doubles down. When spending fails, it spends more. When regulations stall growth, it creates more. When inflation rises, it prints more. This is motion without direction and activity without achievement.

Leadership is not measured by how loudly new programs are announced but by whether those programs actually work. After 10 years of announcements, Canadians are asking a simple question: Where are the results?

Conservatives offer a better way: common-sense leadership for all Canadians. We believe prosperity is built, not borrowed; government must live within its means as families do; and work should be rewarded, not taxed into discouragement. Our plan is clear: We will balance the budget to secure long-term stability, end hidden taxes and scrap the industrial carbon tax, cut wasteful spending and stop corporate welfare, streamline regulations to build homes and attract investment, and restore justice so that those who harm others face real consequences. We will replace the revolving door of ideology with a doorway to growth, accountability and hope.

Canada was built by people who worked, saved and built, not by governments that borrowed, taxed and apologized. We were a nation of builders. After 10 years of the Liberal government, we are now a nation that has borrowed $100,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It must stop.

Canadians need more. They need a government that measures success not by how much it spends but by how much it delivers.

They want a plan to stop the revolving door of debt, inflation and ideology, one that replaces it with affordability, accountability and growth.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, John Nater]

It is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, Employment; the hon. member for York—Durham, Housing; the hon. member for Saanich—Gulf Islands, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship.

[Guillaume Deschênes-Thériault, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I believe that my colleague was a municipal councillor before becoming a federal MP, so he understands the importance of infrastructure funding. The budget renews the Canada community-building fund with $27.8 billion over 10 years. There are investments of over $22 billion, including $6 billion for regionally significant projects and $17 billion for a provincial and territorial stream for housing-enabling infrastructure such as water, sewers and roads.

I believe that my colleague also has experience in the health care sector. We are also making a $5-billion investment in health care infrastructure.

As a former municipal councillor and as someone who has professional experience in the health care sector, is my colleague as enthusiastic as I am about these infrastructure announcements?

[Chak Au, Conservative, Richmond Centre—Marpole, BC]

Mr. Speaker, he is right that I have experience in municipal government. This is the biggest difference: In the municipal government, we are not allowed to run a deficit budget. The Liberal government is recklessly running deficit budgets year after year. As I mentioned, the success of a government is not measured by how much it spends. It cannot just throw out money without any concrete results, especially as the Auditor General mentioned that it is a systemic problem. The government spends money without monitoring and without measuring success.

I hope that it can learn from the municipal governments in Canada.

[Jean-Denis Garon, Bloc, Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my understanding is that my colleague has previously served as a city councillor. I would like to know his thoughts on the fact that the federal budget, as presented, includes only $9 billion in new infrastructure funding over five years. Furthermore, within that, there is $5 billion over three years for hospitals from coast to coast. Today, building a single teaching hospital costs more than $5 billion. The Maisonneuve-Rosemont hospital in Montreal will cost even more.

As a city councillor, would my colleague have felt insulted to receive such crumbs from the federal government?

[Chak Au, Conservative, Richmond Centre—Marpole, BC]

Mr. Speaker, one of the biggest problems with the budget is that it has not addressed the problems that every Canadian is facing right now. The Liberals can promise a lot of things for the future, but they have done nothing about the real problems that Canadians are facing day in and day out. They can promise a hospital, but where are the doctors? Where is the medical staff? They could not even get this problem fixed. They are just giving us another rosy picture so that we can forget what we are suffering right now. This is deceptive.

[Sandra Cobena, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Mr. Speaker, of course, if we go back a few months, we heard, time and time again, one of those slogans that the government used and that the Prime Minister used, which was around spending less. We now have the budget, and we see that they are spending $141 billion more. The deficit is bigger than he promised. We have a mounting amount of debt, at $324 billion more. There are Canadians who voted and who put their faith in the slogan of spending less. That is not what is reflected in the budget.

Could the hon. member speak to how his constituents may feel after seeing the budget?

[Chak Au, Conservative, Richmond Centre—Marpole, BC]

Mr. Speaker, this is the reality that Canadians are facing right now. When the government is building a bigger and bigger deficit, one day, the debt has to be repaid. That is why taxes are going to be bigger and bigger in the future. As I mentioned, Canadians are already facing the fact that when we earn money, we pay taxes. When we spend money, we have to pay taxes. Even when we save money, we also have to pay taxes. This is the reality the deficit creates. Tax, tax, tax is the daily experience of Canadians.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Clarke, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour and privilege to rise in this House. At the end of the day, I do not think there is a better saying to sum up this budget than Winston Churchill's; he said that a nation trying to tax itself into prosperity is akin to a man jumping into a bucket and then yanking on the handle and wondering why he did not get pulled up. There has never once been a country in the entire history of humanity that has been able to tax itself into prosperity, and it will not start here.

I wanted to start with a bit of fun, but it makes a point. Of course, the deficit was announced at $78 billion. That can be hard for people to wrap their heads around. Seventy-eight billion is not a number that most people will come across. Maybe if they work for Brookfield they will, but the rest of us really will not have that opportunity, so I will give people an idea of what they could do with $78 billion.

With $78 billion, they could buy over 7,000 private islands. They could buy over 700 Icon-class mega-yachts. Those are the types that Jeff Bezos and Brookfield-type folks have. They could buy over 30,000 luxury homes in Beverly Hills. They could buy 100 of the top soccer clubs. They could buy about 15 or so NFL franchises. They could buy themselves 15,000 private jets.

If people are not interested in those wealthy accoutrements, I have more ideas people might be interested in. They could fund the World Food Programme to end hunger at the United Nations for 10 years. For 10 years, they could feed the hungry. Maybe space exploration is of interest to people. For $78 billion, they could fly 780 Artemis moon missions. Maybe someone is into clean energy and thinks that is important, as I do. They could install 1,500 gigawatt facilities. Health care, of course, is important to us all. If we did not have this deficit, we could build over 7,000 hospitals. In education, we could endow over 1,500 Harvards across this country with $78 billion.

This one is fun: If we took $100 bills and stacked them to reach $78 billion, we would be higher than the orbit for space. If we had gold, we would have 10% of all the gold ever mined in human history. That is 39 billion iPhones. It is also enough to give everyone on the planet $10. That is a lot of money.

I will tell members what some of the experts have said as well.

Kim Moody said:

The ugly outweighs the good by a significant amount. This budget is a financial disaster. Our youth and future new Canadians will be left to pay off the massive spending spree well past when the authors of this mess are gone. And to pay it off there are really only three paths: significant tax increases to pay down the growing debt and increased debt charges; significant austerity or both.

In the end, this budget isn’t a spaghetti western, it’s a slow-motion fiscal shootout where taxpayers are the ones left holding the smoking gun. The good parts are minor cameos, the bad dominates the middle, and the ugly rides off with our future saddled in debt.

If this is what passes for “generational investment,” future generations may wish they’d been written out of the script.

That is the reality of the budget. I have had a bit of fun to show what $78 billion could get us, and we have heard from some of the experts. The reality is that this is a scary time for Canada. This budget will encumber our country with generational debt, without any positive transformation, or none to point to. There are 78 billion reasons we should not vote for the budget.

The reality is that we are coming off 10 years of what we can call fiscal malfeasance. The government has failed Canadians at every turn. In the last 10 years, we have had the worst economic growth since the Great Depression. How did we get here? The government created a fiscal imbalance. Increasingly, it put more and more resources into the public sector while starving the private sector.

The public sector is absolutely necessary and is important for our safety net, health care and equity, but at some point, we have to stop starving the private sector of resources. It is ultimately where our productivity comes from.

It is not shocking, then, that as the government increasingly reallocated resources from the private sector to the public sector, we saw declining productivity. The OECD has us ranked as one of the worst performers with respect to productivity. That is not because we do not have the best workers in the world. We do. Where the problem lies is in both innovation and capital.

We have been one of the worst countries over the last 10 years with respect to investments. An American worker, for example, has two to three times as much investment in the tools and equipment they are utilizing compared to a Canadian worker. There is an analogy I often use. If two workers are competing to dig a hole and one has a shovel and the other has a backhoe, the one who has the backhoe will win 100 times no matter how hard the man or woman with the shovel works at digging the hole.

We have seen the economy increasingly starved of capital. What is the government's response? It is going to suffocate the private sector more. It is going to suck more resources out of the private sector and out of the women and men who have the best ability to reallocate resources.

Ultimately, what happens when there is an allocation of resources? The way that capitalism works is it counts on millions of Canadians to make thousands of different decisions. Those individual decision points allow us to be more efficient. What has happened in Ottawa is an increasing centralization of those funds. We have taken the money from all the people who have earned it and are so brilliant at allocating resources and given it to bureaucrats to, unfortunately in many cases, squander, as we have seen with the green slush fund and the numerous scandals of money going out the door. We need to get more of those resources back to the individuals who actually earned them and are so careful with spending each and every dollar, to maximize resources as we go forward.

The Liberals will say they are spending less and spending more at the same time. This is a George Orwell-type quote for them to say. They tell the Conservatives they are spending less and tell the NDP they are spending more. Obviously, they cannot do both things at the same time, even though that is what they say.

The verdict is in. We see that program spending is going to increase by over 16% to over $100 billion. What is that going to result in? It will result in debt charges growing from over $50 billion to over $70 billion. That money has to come from somewhere. It will come from hard-working Canadians through either direct taxation or inflation. Either way, we are withdrawing more money from the private sector. That in itself is not good.

The challenge is that it hurts even more than that, because money in the private sector gets multiplied. It becomes more money, as great entrepreneurs across this land, from Quebec to British Columbia, utilize that cash to grow their businesses and employ more people, who then go out and spend more money to empower more businesses. This is as opposed to the government's plan to take truckloads of more and more money to Ottawa and dump it on the fire. That money does not get multiplied. In fact, it gets reduced.

After nearly 100 years of undeniable truth, we have found that when we reduce the burden on the private sector, when we reduce the burden on the people and when we give them more freedom, there is more prosperity. That has been the case for well over 100 years. Whenever tax cuts have happened, whether by Brian Mulroney, Stephen Harper or any of the great prime ministers of the past, we grew the economy. Every time we have increased taxes, the economy has contracted.

We can see this. As one of the most compelling pieces of evidence, if we track the Canadian dollar over the last 30 or 40 years, we see that underneath every single Conservative prime minister, the Canadian dollar has spiked in value. Do members know what happens as soon as a Liberal is elected? It falls almost directly. It is really uncanny. It dips down.

We had an opportunity to free our people or pad Liberal insiders and bureaucrats, and we know what the Liberals have decided to do.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Richmond East—Steveston, BC]

Mr. Speaker, just prior to the member's speech, we heard a speech from a Richmond city councillor who is also currently sitting as the member of Parliament for Richmond Centre—Marpole.

I got a little chuckle out of his speech because he talked about wasteful spending. Let us look at the Lulu Island waste-water treatment plant, the Iona waste-water treatment plant and a number of infrastructure investments that were done in Richmond, British Columbia, my hometown, like the pump stations, the dykes, and the soccer field at the Olympic Oval, which is in the member for Richmond Centre—Marpole's riding. He took photos with me at every announcement.

I am curious. Does the member opposite thinks that is wasteful investment for our city, as he said, or should we not continue to have this money go back to the communities that are important—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, John Nater]

The hon. member for Northumberland—Clarke.