Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise in the House today to speak to Bill C-8.
The first thing I want to do is go back a bit in time. Madam Speaker, I think you were there as well for those times. It goes back to when Jim Flaherty was the finance minister. He had a budget that was called the “economic action plan”. It was a main event back in those times. Economists and business owners and people from all over looked at this economic action plan as the path forward for the Canadian economy, especially in those times of the huge economic downturn in 2007 and 2008. It was really a shining light, I would say. It allowed us to get through that time and by 2015 to present the new Liberal government with a balanced budget.
Back in that time of 2015 and over the next four years, the government spent $100 billion extra over what it collected. That will go into history and will be a guiding light for future governments. It goes back to when we were kids and our grandparents were telling us that when times were good, we should salt a bit away. That way, when times get bad, we would have a bit more to spend to keep going.
The Liberals actually really spent when times were good, and when times were bad, they really spent a lot. In 2015 the federal debt was about $600 billion, and in seven short years we are at the point that we have doubled that debt to $1.2 trillion. We have not doubled it; the Liberal government has doubled it to $1.2 trillion so that the amount that each and every Canadian owes has doubled. It is unfortunate.
I understand the times. Yes, there was some money that went to helping Canadians tremendously. We obviously know that, but nevertheless, the numbers are the numbers.
There are a couple of things I want to point out. One thing is inflation. We hear this on the news. Ten years ago, we did not really hear about inflation. Even five years ago we did not hear about it. Now there are different excuses for inflation. In September, it was transitory. In October, it was transitory. In November, it was greedy corporations; it was their fault. In December, it was the supply chain. In January, it was the supply chain. Now, in February, it is Russia. Can members believe this? In a matter of six months, we have had at least four or five different reasons to blame for the inflation. That is an impossibility.
We know that when there is a limited or decreasing supply of goods and an increasing monetary supply, we are going to have inflation. Some have estimated a 40% increase in the monetary supply in this country in the last two years. The only people to blame for such increased spending are the people sitting across the hall here in the House of Commons. They are the only reason. They cannot blame Ukraine and they cannot blame it on being transitory. They have gotten rid of that term now because it was debunked.
The other thing I hear, more than time to time, is GDP growth. The finance minister has talked a number of times about GDP growth. However, to my mind and to many other people's minds, when inflation is close to 6%, the highest in 30 years, and when some economists say that if we calculate inflation as it was calculated 40 years ago or 30 years ago, inflation is over 10%, how can they claim to have GDP growth of 4.2% in 2021? It is all new monetary supply and it is all inflation.
The Liberals even have, in their fall economic statement, a term called “GDP inflation”. That should put to bed all of the finance minister's claims about robust GDP growth. In fact, there are so many warning points and warning signs in the fall economic update about headwinds and what if this happens and what if that happens that this fall economic statement is what I would call priced to perfection. Anything less than perfection is going to produce a catastrophic result.
Let us look at what is going on right now. Brent crude this morning is $113 U.S. That was not in any projections. It is doubtful that GDP growth will be as high as it was in 2021. That will reduce government revenues. There are a lot of issues with this fall economic update.
The Bank of Canada claims to have stopped quantitative easing. That is great, but it has not started on quantitative tightening. What the bank calls it now is “quantitative reinvestment”. We are creating all these new terms for things, and really it is just fooling around with the money supply.
If we go back in time and really look at money and the Bretton Woods agreement, which came about during the Second World War and remained in place until the gold standard was abandoned in 1971, money was actually backed by something. Money is just debt. That is all money is today, and it is unfortunate that the government of the day does not respect money. It does not respect the taxes that people pay.
I saw an article just the other night, maybe last night. It was in the Toronto Star, so we know it must be true if they are reporting it on the Liberals. It said what the government was spending on Harrington Lake, and I could not believe it. It was something like $14 million that has been spent on the old property at Harrington Lake, and we know the Prime Minister built a new place at Harrington Lake for $9 million. The government has also spent $3.6 million on the Rideau Hall property, the Governor General's property.
I am not going to go into all that, because in the big scheme of things we are talking about trillions and billions of dollars, but this just goes to show the lack of respect for the taxpayer dollar and for the small business owners who have been grinding it out and grinding it out. They see that and have a lot of unique words that they use when they describe how much they dislike the spending.
As for gold, in the sixties the government owned 1,000 tonnes of gold. By 2003 there were only 3.4 tonnes of gold left, and we know who was mainly in government during that time. The Government of Canada sold the last of its gold in 2016, as far as I know, and it sold it at $1,245 an ounce. If we look today at the price of gold, we see it is almost $2,000 U.S. an ounce.
There are a lot of talented Liberal members of Parliament. I would not dispute that, and we hear of the Prime Minister's golden touch or Midas touch, but I would argue that pretty much everything the Prime Minister touches is the opposite of the Midas touch or the gold touch. Pretty much everything he touches is a disaster. We can even look at selling the gold. He sold low in a good time, so I do not know about that.
Another one is the green bond. That is in the economic update. In my riding I have the largest nuclear facility in the world, Bruce Power. It is a huge job creator. It generates baseload power for the Ontario grid, and unbelievably, to the shame of the environment minister, nuclear power was left out. There are so many jobs in Liberal-held ridings in Toronto and around the GTA that I cannot believe the members in that caucus would go for that. I would be furious.
The idea of a green bond is to reduce emissions. In the province of Ontario, there were smog days 20 years ago. Anybody who lives around southwestern Ontario remembers those days. Those are gone, and it is because of nuclear energy. To put nuclear power in with tobacco and all the other things they put it in with is really an insult, and I have heard from a lot of nuclear power employees who are quite outraged by that.
Another issue is around COVID tests and vaccinations. I would like the government to table how many vaccines have been thrown out in the last six months. I estimate the value in the tens of millions of dollars and maybe the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The other thing is COVID tests. This is another disaster. Maybe it will come up in questions.
