Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to join in debate today on our opposition day motion on the sovereign debt fund. The motion reads:
That, given that,
(i) sovereign wealth funds must have wealth that comes from budget surpluses and resource revenues,
(ii) this government has run no surpluses, only deficits for the last 11 years and has no funds to invest,
(iii) the Prime Minister is proposing to put his 25-billion-dollar fund on the national credit card, which will cause further inflationary pressure,
(iv) the Prime Minister has already created 12 new Crown corporations, agencies and bureaucracies,
(v) when government directs capital, it always goes to the politically powerful and not the deserving,
(vi) there is over 1 trillion dollars in pension fund money that Liberals have pushed out of Canada that we could bring back with faster permits, lower taxes and free enterprise,
(vii) the rising cost of fuel and food is already burdening hard working Canadians who cannot afford to pay more for handouts to Liberal insiders and corporate elites,
therefore, the House call on the government to abandon this sovereign debt fund.
This is what we are talking about today. I find it so ironic. I come from the province of Saskatchewan, with hard-working and good people in agriculture, mining, oil and gas, manufacturing, small business and entrepreneurship. We have been through this before. We have seen this movie before in Saskatchewan, where the government thinks it knows how to invest money better than the private sector. It was called “16 years of nothing under an NDP government”.
There is someone in the House who was part of that NDP government, from northern Saskatchewan, and they were a disaster in government in Saskatchewan. Actually, the old joke in Saskatchewan when the NDP was in government was that the last one to cross the Alberta border turned out the lights. That is how dim it became in Saskatchewan under the NDP.
I see this same movie replaying itself nationally with the Liberal government, the tired 11‑year Liberal government. It looks very similar to the NDP government that was in Saskatchewan.
I would like to look back and talk about some of the investments a tired old NDP government made in Saskatchewan. There were failed investments, and it lost hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars. This was back in the mid- to late 1990s and early 2000s. It lost $15 million in Channel Lake. It lost $72 million in Navigata. One of the biggest boondoggles in Saskatchewan was $35 million with Spudco, a failed potato company.
All these just bring back memories. When I hear the Liberals talk about the sovereign debt fund, it reminds me of all the money we lost in Saskatchewan under an NDP government that thought it knew how to invest money better than the private sector. The actual total loss in Saskatchewan over those years was 283.5 million tax dollars in failed investments by the government. That was in 1995 dollars to 2000 dollars, which would be over $1 billion now.
That really looks like what we are talking about today. The government never does better than the private sector. That is why we continue to talk about why we need better investments. If the government wants to attract more investment in this country, it should start with getting rid of red tape. It should start with getting rid of Bill C-69 and the shipping ban on the west coast of Vancouver. There are so many things the government could do that would not put more tax dollars at risk, which is what it is doing today with the sovereign wealth fund.
Lots of these Liberal members want to be compared to Norway, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. They want to be compared to all the other wealth funds that were set up. There is one huge difference, and Canadians need to realize this. The biggest difference between those funds and this one is that their government did it with surplus dollars. Surplus budgets went into a sovereign fund to be used to make sure the next generations had money. They did not put it on a credit card. If the government of the day wants to start something like this, the first thing it has to do is get its budget in order. It needs to get to a point where there is enough investment in the country to have surplus budgets to then invest dollars.
Another huge difference between what this Prime Minister wants to do and what was done in Norway is that the money was not invested in Norway; it was invested outside of Norway. Those are huge terms of reference that are very different from what the government is doing here today.
I really appreciate the comments by the previous speaker, my friend from Calgary Centre. He is very knowledgeable about the financial sector. He said that this fund is just like all the other funds the government has set up, such as the failed Canada Infrastructure Bank, which made a pipeline in China and did not build one in Canada. We do not realize that this fund is very similar to the green slush fund.
Sorry, Mr. Speaker, that was the Asian infrastructure bank that they put money into. I will correct the record because, unlike some other members, I like to be as factual as possible and not misleading.
I remember that right before the last election, this Parliament was seized with another slush fund, the green slush fund. Actually, a Liberal Speaker approved a question of privilege where we could not go past the debate about the green slush fund, and $300 million to $400 million of taxpayer money was given to Liberal insider friends and elites. There were 186 conflicts of interest in that $300-million slush fund.
Can members imagine, once the banker buddy of the Prime Minister gets appointed as CEO and all of his Laurentian elite friends become board members, how many conflicts of interest are going to be in the sovereign debt fund by the time the Liberals are done giving out $25 billion to some of their best friends and insiders? That is what we are talking about right now as being a political economy. The average hard-working Canadian is $200 away from being bankrupt at the end of the month. There is always more month left than there are dollars in their bank account. However, politically connected insiders with the Liberals have never had it so good.
I cannot go on without talking about the fiscal update. This spring fiscal update is fantastic for bankers and bondholders. They have never had it so good. The fastest-increasing budget item is $60 billion in deficit spending, putting that money to the debt. Debt financing is higher than health transfers to provinces, and that is shameful. Seeing how much money is going to corporate insiders is why we believe this sovereign debt fund is such a terrible idea. The Liberals are awful money managers, much like the NDP in Saskatchewan in the 2000s. They are terrible at managing people's money. They will lose it, and that is why we are so concerned about what this sovereign debt fund would look like.
I would end on the fact that we do not have any confidence in the current government to manage the money without having more conflicts of interest. This is the most ethically problematic government we have had in our country. There were more ethics violations and conflicts of interest in the government in the last 10 years than in all Canadian governments combined. Justin Trudeau was found violating ethics twice when he was prime minister, for the first time ever. Now, this Prime Minister has a blind trust and does not think that he is going to be found in a conflict of interest with all of his dealings. I think he believes that PM stands for “portfolio manager”, not “prime minister”. He is in it for Brookfield and himself, not for the people of Canada. That is why this sovereign wealth fund, or sovereign debt fund, would just be another vehicle for him to make his corporate buddies richer. The Canadian taxpayers would be left paying at the end of the day. It would make Canadians poorer, but the Prime Minister and his buddies on the champagne cocktail circuit would be richer.