Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to get up on behalf of the hard-working constituents of Leduc—Wetaskiwin to weigh in on debates, particularly debates about fiscal issues.
When listening to the debate today, and ultimately after listening to the debate over the last 10 years, it seems that there is an increasing number of Liberals who are standing up to praise their own government, to pat their own government on the back, about ever-increasing, new amounts of spending. That seems to be increasing exponentially as this government gets longer in the tooth. When I say “this government”, I mean the 10-year Liberal government, because I cannot see that anything has changed since the last election. If anything, the spending is getting higher and less responsible.
Watching what is happening in the House is kind of like watching a Liberal minister go to someone's house, maybe a member's house or some other Canadian voter's house. They take $1,000 from that voter and put together a little parade with a little marching band, party hats, kazoos and whatever the case might be, and then they walk next door with video cameras all fully operating to capture every moment while they hand over $800 to the neighbour. That is out of the $1,000 that they collected from the person in the first place. They give the neighbours $800 and then they broadcast this and post it on social media. The $200 goes into a pot to pay consultants and new public servants.
We have added over 100,000 public servants over the last decade. The Liberals just do this again and again, and then they come to the House for question period, and when we ask them questions about this strategy of taking $1,000 and giving back $800 over and over again to people, they wag their fingers at us, as if to say, “Shame on Conservatives for wanting to take away that $800.” What the Liberals do not say is that we are advocating for them to not take the $1,000, every single time this process happens, over and over again. Of course, this adds up. It adds up to the tune of, this year, $78 billion. This year, we are seeing that our government debt now is more than twice what it was when we were in power.
Back in 2015, when Conservatives were in power, we had a balanced budget. We had the richest middle class in the world. In fact, it was not us who said that. The New York Times reported that, for every person in the world who was in the 30th percentile of best off, the 40th percentile of best off or the 50th percentile of best off, of every country in the world, Canadians were the richest. Canadians were the best off, compared to every single country in the world in 2015. Then, we had a change in government. We had a balanced budget in 2015, and now we have rattled off 10 straight years of ever-increasing deficit budgets.
The last Liberal member who got up to speak talked about the interest payments paid by a Conservative government in the late eighties and early nineties. What that Liberal member did not point out was that the interest was run up during 14 out of 15 straight Trudeau government deficits, or 14 deficits in 15 years under the Pierre Trudeau government. It wound up running into a situation, or not “running into” because it was not externally driven, but internally, the government wound up creating a situation where we had an energy crisis, a housing crisis, an economic crisis broadly and an interest-rate crisis. To be fair to the Mulroney government of the late eighties and early nineties, it ran a balanced budget, if we were to take interest payments out of the equation. However, the interest on the Trudeau-era debt wound up being the highest deficits in Canadian history, made up exclusively of Trudeau-era interest payments.
Today, we find ourselves in a situation where we have had another decade of Liberal government and another decade of continuous deficits running up that debt. Today, we are in a situation, not unlike where we were before, where we are now paying more in interest than we are paying in the Canada health transfers. It is insane, quite frankly, that we would be paying more in interest than we are in the Canada health transfers, and that is entirely because of decisions undertaken by this Liberal government.
I will point to one of those decisions, and it is very topical this week. One of those specific decisions was the decision to kill the northern gateway pipeline a decade ago. The Liberal government, when it first came in, made a decision on the northern gateway pipeline, which had been approved, and it was going through its last stages before it would be operational. That pipeline would have shipped 525,000 barrels of oil a day to Asian markets. However, the Liberal government killed that pipeline. It would have meant billions of dollars coming in annually to the Canadian government. It would have had a huge impact on the economy.
Instead of that economic supercharge, which we would have had from that pipeline, the Liberals exacted crushing economic policies that had, by the way, no environmental benefit, while they doubled Canada's debt. We know who did benefit from those Liberal policies. Obviously, it was anybody who had invested in some of the environmental schemes that they had come up with. I would say the current Prime Minister definitely benefited from many of those Liberal policies. As well, the governments, or the people, of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela benefited. Maybe it was not the people. Maybe it was the governments, elected or non-elected, depending on what country we are talking about, although in most of those cases they were not elected, that wound up getting very rich, because we decided we were not going to sell our oil. That just left the market open for them to sell more of their oil.
What did Canadians get for that sacrifice, other than a mountain of Liberal debt? We have not heard from anybody in the House of Commons on that. We have not heard any Liberal mention that. During the election campaign, the Prime Minister promised only $62 billion in debt in Canada. It is astonishing that that phrase would be the restriction, that somehow the promise was made that we would be restricted to $62 billion in deficit.
If we look back to the early Trudeau days, when there was just going to be tiny deficits, just for a couple of years. Now we are sitting here, 10 years later, and we have gone from a promise of a $62-billion deficit, and a promise that the new guy was going to be fiscally and economically responsible, and that things were going to be different, to having largely the same front bench that we had back then and, magically, somehow, we have increased the deficit from $62 billion to $78 billion, with no explanation.
If we go back to those days of 2015, we had a balanced budget and the richest middle class in the world, which was under the Stephen Harper government, after coming out of a global economic meltdown.
It is interesting that the Liberal member for Winnipeg is giggling over there as he is contemplating maybe how good life was for his constituents at that point in time, because they had jobs. We had the flexibility, as a government, to come to this place and really contemplate what a hopeful future would look like. We had flexibility in our budgets, and we were in control of spending.
We have all of that new spending, and all of those new public servants who have been added in the government, but when we talk to any constituents, and I cannot imagine this is any different for Liberal members of Parliament than it is for Conservative members of Parliament, and ask them to name one area of their life that is better in 2025 than it was in 2015, they cannot do it.
Our health care system, clearly, when we talk to anyone who has experienced the health care system, is struggling and suffering. Housing is incredibly more expensive than it was. It is way more difficult to get a house than it was. We can look at criminal justice measures, and serious violent crime has increased drastically over that time. Any Canadian, any constituent, will tell us those things.
With virtually any measure that we look at, things are worse today than they were 10 years ago. They are worse today than they were one year ago, when this new Prime Minister was touting his new government and his world-leading expertise economically. This has proven not to be the case. I look forward to any Liberal member who actually wants to weigh in on this conversation asking me questions.
