Mr. Speaker, hopefully the parliamentary secretary does a better job with this question than the last one. It is interesting that he is here again today to pad his word count. I noticed that the challenge he had just now was that he was answering questions the Liberals knew were coming from the shadow minister for health. Rather than have the parliamentary secretary for health answer the questions, as would normally be the case, I do not know why they would have this parliamentary secretary answer. I do not know why he is here to answer my questions today as well.
The question I asked back in November came after the budget. At that point in time, Fitch Ratings came out raising an alarm. It said, in a release it put out, that “Canada’s...proposed budget, announced in Parliament on Nov. 4, underscores the erosion of the federal government’s finances”. It went on to say, “persistent fiscal expansion and a rising debt burden have weakened its credit profile and could increase rating pressure over the medium term.”
At that point in time, I raised the issue of the previous long-standing Liberal government, the government that was in place from 1993 until we finally got relief in January of 2006, just over 20 years ago. Of course, that government was dealing with the impacts of another previous Trudeau government that ran 14 deficits in 15 years. A generation later, the Chrétien-Martin government had to deal with the effects of all of those deficits and the debt that had risen. By the way, the debt that had been added was so high that the subsequent Mulroney government, who the Liberals at that time liked to say ran the biggest deficits in Canadian history, deficits that were entirely interest on Trudeau debt, was forced to cut 32% from the transfers for health, social services and education. I think it was called the Canada social transfer.
I raised the fact that at that point in time, those cuts were precipitated by a ratings cut. Fitch has announced that it is concerned about Canada's fiscal situation. I asked if anyone over there understood the situation. At that point, instead of the finance minister standing, the Minister of Energy stood up, and I am sure this is very reassuring for all Canadians. He said, “We are doing just fine.” That was the reassurance we got.
Therefore, I asked a second question that day and walked through some quotes from the early nineties from Reuters. From February 1994, it says, “Liberal government brings down what it considers to be a tough budget.... It nonetheless still has spending rising slightly, and immediate public and market reaction is it did not go nearly far enough.” In January 1995, this was a headline: “A biting editorial in the Wall Street Journal headlined 'Bankrupt Canada' calls Canada 'an honorary member of the Third World'”.
I have been raising this alarm and I think Canadians should be concerned, because the government has added another $16 billion in debt since the promise made at election time, and since the budget it has added billions more in spending that is not accounted for. I am curious how we have gone, in just a decade, from a country with a balanced budget and the richest middle class in the world to a country that has to borrow from our kids to subsidize groceries for an entire generation.