Mr. Speaker, last June I asked the minority Liberal government if it would respect the vote of Parliament and table a budget. The Minister of Transport and Internal Trade declined to answer. Instead, she praised her new Prime Minister's latest costly political gimmick.
Nine months ago, that same minister resigned her position as Trudeau's finance minister. This saved her the embarrassment of tabling another broken fiscal budget. She was spared from having to admit she had broken through her fiscal guardrails by tabling a $40-billion deficit. What should be even more humiliating is that it was only 18 months ago that she tabled the 2024 budget, which claimed the deficit for this fiscal year would be $38 billion. Independent estimates suggest this year's deficit will be anywhere from $80 billion to $100 billion. That is more than double what the former finance minister promised in 2024.
The Liberals are not just crashing through their fiscal guardrails; they are nuking them from outer space. This level of fiscal recklessness is dangerous at the best of times, but we are not living in those times right now. Around the world, bright flashing warning lights are going off about governments' debt and deficits. Riots in France followed the collapse of the French government after it failed to pass a budget to reduce the deficit. The Prime Minister of Japan resigned amid growing concerns over the bond market.
One would think that a former central banker would understand that the days of governments having easy access to debt are coming to an end, yet the current minority Liberal government seems hell-bent on testing the limits of investors' patience. What is worse is that the Liberal Party is doubling down on failed economic policies. As Americans turn away from the principles of economic freedom, the Liberals seem to be adopting more and more Canadian-style protectionism. It should worry Canadians when the government brags about ignoring trade deals with Europe and Asia that require free trade in procurement. When Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders is celebrating a Republican president's move to seize a 10% stake in a private company, freedom-loving Canadians should take note.
We now have a Prime Minister who cannot stop talking about using public money to catalyze private wealth. We saw from the Prime Minister in his fake housing announcement on Friday how this works. The Prime Minister announced millions of tax dollars that would flow into a modular housing company he had invested in. The Liberals claim that these affordable modular homes will be built on federal land. Here is a quote from a news story about the Liberal housing announcement: “Canada plans to ease a housing shortage by leasing public land to developers for construction of affordable houses under a plan unveiled by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau”.
I am sorry: That quote is from last year's identical Liberal housing announcement. The only new thing in the Prime Minister's announcement was a new bureaucracy the Liberals announced to duplicate the work of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Last year, when Trudeau made the same announcement, we saw the result. Nothing was built, because the Liberal regulations required homes to be multi-unit, net-zero, gender-neutral and decolonized. It is unsurprising that few developers leapt at the chance to build tiny woke homes that nobody wants to live in. Soon the Liberals will learn that Canadians do not want to raise their families in modular boxes stacked atop one another, but by then it will be too late. Liberal insiders will have pocketed the housing cash and the government will move on to announcing its next recycled housing plan to not build homes.