Madam Speaker, it has been well over two years since the last budget was tabled in the House. After all this time, one would have expected that our Liberal friends would have gotten it right. Instead, budget 2021 is a massive letdown. Instead of building back better, as the Prime Minister had so vacuously promised, and focusing on job creation and long-term growth, this budget has left us with bigger debt, bigger deficits, an avalanche of unfocused spending and a much bigger and more intrusive government.
Our Conservatives have repeatedly supported emergency programs for struggling Canadians to make it through the pandemic. What we cannot support is the Liberal government's failure to address the most urgent health and economic issues facing our country.
The virus has inflicted untold damage and put intense pressure on our health care system. Health care workers and hospitals are under siege. Even today, only 3% of Canadians have received their second dose of vaccine, while in the U.S., 32% of Americans have been fully vaccinated. How can that be?
The Prime Minister has failed to put forward strategic investments to ramp up vaccinations and provide the help the provinces and territories have asked for, as they struggle to contain the virus and treat the thousands of sick and dying patients. In fact, he has refused to sit down with those provinces to discuss health care support. Instead, the Prime Minister has said that he will get around to discussing this once the COVID pandemic is over. The premiers had asked for one thing, and that was a reliable federal partner to help them in the fight against COVID-19. They did not get one.
The budget also fails to live up to the Liberal government's own financial commitments. For example, the finance minister had originally signalled that $100 billion of additional spending would be used to stimulate the economy, but only if absolutely necessary.
Today, the parliamentary budget officer noted that in fact a good portion of the spending was not used to stimulate the economy at all. In classic Liberal fashion, much of the so-called stimulus was instead spent on measures intended to further the political interests of the Liberal government. The PBO even noted that the Liberals could have reduced Canada's massive deficits by more than $100 billion over the next six years. Instead, they chose to spend that money on an avalanche of election goodies to buy the votes of Canadians.
The minister's own mandate letter from the Prime Minister instructed her to present a new fiscal anchor, in other words, rules and safeguards, to guide her management of the massive debt and deficits that the Liberals had created. Yet, the best she could do was to recycle the old debt-to-GDP ratio, but this time without any firm targets. What is very clear is that the government has no intention of ever returning to balance, even in the longer term.
The PBO's newly released report for parliamentarians highlights a number of other things. First, the finance minister's stimulus has been miscalibrated. That is his term. In other words, it missed the mark. Second, the finance minister failed to distinguish between stimulus spending and COVID spending. I would suggest that she may have conflated the two to hide the fact that much of the spending was, indeed, election related. The PBO also said that the Liberals had overstated the economic impact of the stimulus. In other words, they misrepresented and oversold the value of the stimulus.
We also found out that the Liberal government had left itself no fiscal room. In other words, the Prime Minister has maxed out our country's credit card and ability to make future investments.
Finally, the PBO confirms that the government is not on course to return our debt and deficits to pre-pandemic levels, another big fail.
However, to be sure, there are some measures in the budget that Conservatives support, for example, the extension of the emergency support measures like the wage subsidy, the rent subsidy and other recovery benefits as well as the hiring and training program for employers to maintain a level playing field and allow them to transition from the wage subsidy program. There is an improved tax treatment for capital investment over a two-year time frame and there is some support for hospitality, tourism and culture, although not the support required to reflect that these sectors were the hardest hit, the first to be shut down and will likely be the last to reopen.
Quite frankly, what I heard from tourism stakeholders is that they do not want handouts. What they want is for the government to come up with a plan to safely reopen the economy and let them do what they do best, which is to sustain and create good-paying jobs. Sadly, they did not get that plan.
In the lead up to the budget, we had sent the Prime Minister and his finance minister letters outlining the measures we believed were critical to fuelling our post-pandemic recovery. Unsurprisingly, almost all our advice was ignored, including on child care. Instead of building on existing family support measures that would deliver immediate relief to parents wanting to enter the labour force, the Liberals recycled an old promise to create an Ottawa-knows-best one-size-fits-all regulated day care program, one that will leave millions of Canadian parents behind.
The minister herself acknowledged just now that it would take at least five years to get this program in place to negotiate child care agreements with the provinces. Meanwhile, parents wishing to enter the labour force right now will be left hanging. Liberal leaders have made the very same child care promise in almost every election since 1993 and have never, ever delivered. Canadians have a right to skeptical.
Remember, this was supposed to be a growth budget. That is what the Prime Minister promised. Therefore, will this budget actually grow the economy and position us for long-term prosperity? Not at all. In fact, high profile Liberals like the Prime Minister's former economic adviser, Robert Asselin, have acknowledged this budget is not about long-term growth.
Today's PBO report confirms that significant elements of this budget were misrepresented by the Liberal government and overstate the stimulus and growth effects on our economy. As other countries provide their citizens with faster access to vaccines, they are also beating us to the punch by giving their economies a shot in the arm.
The U.K. has launched an infrastructure revolution. Italy has introduced what its Prime Minister has called “the mother of all reforms” to slash red tape. France and Germany are cutting taxes. Japan is helping its firms reduce their reliance on China with a shift toward more reliable and ethical trading partners. What did the Liberal budget do? It sprayed billions of dollars around without a clear strategy to position Canada for long-term prosperity.
The budget has no investments to address the structural problems that have plagued productivity and our ability to compete on the global stage. There is no plan to address the unprecedented level of investment that is fleeing Canada. There is no plan for regulatory and tax reform to help us win on the global stage. There is no comprehensive innovation strategy to ensure Canadian tech start-ups keep their job-creating investments here at home.
The budget is largely silent on our world-leading natural resource sector, one of the most significant contributors to our national prosperity. The Liberal government has again turned its back on our oil and gas producing provinces by expressly excluding the sector from the new carbon capture tax credit.
The Liberal government also missed a golden opportunity to substantively address the skyrocketing cost of housing in Canada. The budget introduces a 1% tax on foreign owners of vacant housing, which, quite frankly, will be considered an inconvenience to wealthy foreigners who will simply treat this as a cost of doing business, especially when we see the appreciation property values year over year.
Meanwhile, millions of Canadians are seeing their dream of home ownership slip through their fingers. That is a major failure.
I believe Canadians are looking for hope that things will soon get better and that we still have a bright future to look forward to. They want their jobs and small businesses back. They want their lives and communities back. Simply put, they want a return to normal and to live the Canadian dream.
This budget fails to deliver. There is no growth plan, only spending on an unprecedented scale, and spending is not an economic plan.
