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.