Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Long Range Mountains.
Everyone is depressed. Why? It is because everyone is broke. We are more broke than we think. Do others remember the old Scotiabank commercial, “You're richer than you think”? We are Canadians in the 11th year of a Liberal government who are more broke than we think. Two days ago, the government tabled a 400-page budget with a $78-billion deficit. The Prime Minister, who lectures us about economics and caused record inflation in England, is now going to repeat the same in Canada by spending more money that we do not have.
What happened to our country? There are more than two million people visiting a food bank, more than 700,000 of them children. There are 700,000 Canadian children who are starving, and the Prime Minister and the finance minister are pretending everything is fine. I have spoken to hundreds, maybe thousands of people. No matter where they are on the economic ladder, everyone is worse off, worse than they were six months ago, five years ago and definitely 10 years ago.
The Liberals sit here in question period and pretend that criticizing our economy is unpatriotic. It is the opposite. Standing up for our country when it is in trouble is the most patriotic thing one could do. I will do that because I remember what it was like a decade ago. In 2014, The New York Times came out with a study, which found that Canada's middle class was better than its U.S. counterpart. Ten years ago, Canada had the wealthiest middle class in the world. That is what I remember. When Conservatives were in government, we had more money in our pocket and more ability to put our kid in hockey or music lessons. We had the ability to travel and to go out for dinner with our loved ones. We slept better at night because we had money.
Then came Justin Trudeau, who promised to invest more. He said we needed an economy that worked for everyone and that to do this, he would run a few small deficits. Now, a decade later, we are broke. Now the current Prime Minister and the same old Liberal government are promising to do the same. When the Liberals say they will invest more, what they really mean is they will spend more.
As I was sitting here two days ago, the page handed me the budget book, and I opened it. I do not care what the finance minister has to say, because I could not believe my eyes. There is a $78-billion deficit. To put that into perspective, that is $5,400 for every Canadian family. Just like that, they will owe $5,400 more to the banks and the bondholders, or he will print it on them, flooding the economy with more money to chase nearly the same amount of goods because we do not have any growth. That will raise, or inflate, the price of everything we buy.
Can members believe that we have $55 billion in interest payments alone next year? That is more than $1 billion a week in interest. That is more than the federal government collects in GST from all Canadians. Let us think about that. The next time we see the GST on our receipt, or the HST, which lumps in the GST, all of it goes to service the interest on our debt. At the end of the year, our debt will be $1,347,000,000,000. Over the next five years, the Liberal government is projecting to add another $320 billion in debt. Over the next five years, Canada will pay close to $330 billion in interest alone to foreigners, to banks and to the Prime Minister's cronies.
To be clear, government has no money. It is our money. It either takes it from us in taxes or it prints it. Canadians are some of the highest-taxed people in the world already. An average Canadian family spends over 42% of its income on tax, on income tax, payroll tax, sales tax, fuel tax, alcohol tax. Everywhere there is a tax. What do we have to show for it? Do we have good health care? Do we have good infrastructure? No. We have a Prime Minister whose deficit is double that of Justin's. Justin is out there partying with Katy Perry, but we are all screwed.
We should be the wealthiest country in the world because we are blessed with the greatest natural resources in the world. We have some of the world's highest-proven oil reserves and natural gas, which could satisfy the insatiable demand the world is experiencing for electricity. We have the rare earth minerals everyone is chasing.
We should be living like Saudi princes. We should be like the Qataris. There are 400 pages in this budget, but surprise, there is no pipeline. We are shooting ourselves in the foot. Why do we not just get out of our own way? Why does the government not get out of our way and allow us to drill for energy, export natural gas and use this blessing of our natural resources to put more money in Canadians' pockets?
We are actually importing oil from Russia. Members should think about how crazy that is. Other petroleum producers will not stop, but they pollute the environment. Canada has some of the best environmental practices in the world. Those who are passionate about the environment should want more Canadian oil instead of dirty oil from the Middle East.
To free Canada's natural resources and Canada's oil and gas would mean a richer middle class. It would mean less people at the food bank and a better life. We need to lower taxes for real. The finance minister grandstands every day and yells at us about how he is making life more affordable for 22 million Canadians. The Liberals' income tax cut works out to $20 a month per family. An average family gets $280 a year; that is it.
I could never imagine a budget that spends so much and does so little. What is the government building? It is building a couple of thousand shoeboxes for apartments, which comes to $3 million per apartment when we factor in the cost of the bureaucracy.
The government is trying to fool us by separating the deficit into two. The Prime Minister is telling us that the actual deficit is not $78 billion, no, because $40 billion of it is capital investment, so the deficit is only $38 billion. The Prime Minister is living by his own accounting rules: Abracadabra, the deficit is not $78 billion; it is $38 billion. I say shame on the Liberals for the budget and for making Canadians broke.
I was at the grocery store not too long ago, and there was a very kind lady in front of me. She had a small basket of groceries, among which was an English cucumber. I love cucumber. She asked the lady at the cash register how much the English cucumber would cost. The lady at the cash register told her the price, and the shopper said that she would not need it and returned it. The sales clerk politely smiled at her. I can imagine how many times a day this person sees this, when Canadians come from the grocery aisle to check out, but they have to leave items behind because they cannot afford them.
How dare the government members be proud of the budget? With the endless taxes and inflation, they are making Canadians broke. I say shame on them.