Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be able to join everyone here in the discussions on the budget and the budget implementation act. It is a budget that I proudly voted against. I voted against it for many reasons.
We know that the Prime Minister continues to run up the deficit and the debt in the country. He is using Canada's credit card to finance this very costly and unaffordable budget. The budget continues to drive up the cost of living for Canadians on everything from groceries to housing, new equipment and cars. All of that continues out of control.
We know that since October 2024, the cost of groceries, according to the inflation data that is available, has gone up 3.4%. Year after year, month after month, day after day and week after week, there are more and more costs, yet Canadians' paycheques are not rising. When they do rise, the government Liberals of course are putting their hands into Canadians' pockets, with more and more taxes.
The Prime Minister has broken so many promises since he was sworn in eight months ago. I know that just in the last six months, one promise was that he said he was going to keep the deficit at $16 billion. Guess what. In the budget implementation act, the deficit is $78 billion.
The Prime Minister promised to lower the debt-to-GDP ratio. Guess what. He is raising both it and inflation at the same time. He promised to spend less, but the budget is costing $90 billion more. That is $5,400 more per household across the country in inflationary spending, and that means less money in the pockets of Canadians.
The Prime Minister promised to help municipalities with housing by cutting down house-building taxes in those municipalities. With the budget, he breaks that promise.
The Prime Minister promised that there would be more investment here in Canada, but as we just witnessed when he was in the U.A.E., he is actually taking money out of Canada to invest over there rather than attracting money from the U.A.E. into Canada. Again, that is a broken promise. Investment in the country continues to collapse.
What the budget forces Canadians to do is spend more on debt interest servicing than on health care transfers to the provinces. It is more than what the government actually collects in GST. We also have to remember that the big deficits and the great big debt we have, which is now $1.35 trillion, are money borrowed from bankers and bondholders. It is money that should be in the hands of Canadians. It is not going towards investing in more doctors and nurses in our health care system.
One of the reasons I am opposed to the budget is that it is going to increase our federal debt by over $321.7 billion. That is twice as much as what Justin Trudeau promised he would do, and it means that the budget will borrow $10 million every hour, which will be added to our debt. Our national debt continues to grow, as I said, to $1.35 trillion, costing us $55.6 billion on interest to service that debt. Just to put it in perspective, that is more than the Canada health care transfer to the provinces, which is $54.7 billion.
As the shadow minister for national defence, I do have to talk about the money that is in the budget. As the budget says, Canada will meet the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 2% spending target. I am just wondering how the Liberals are going to get there. The budget proposes that they are going to have $81.8 billion over the next five years on a cash basis. That is over $9 billion more than what the Prime Minister promised in June. There is going to be over $30 billion in capital investments. The Liberals have not said what those capital investments are.
Where are the Liberals actually finding the money, and is it actually increasing the lethality and capability of the Canadian Armed Forces? We know that one place where they are finding money is that they are cutting veterans' benefits by $4.23 billion in the budget. The government whip can sit there and laugh, but it is actually in the budget. As much as Liberals are saying that it is coming out of medical cannabis programs for veterans, that is only $100 million a year, $400 million over four years. They are still at $4.23 billion. Where is the transparency? What services are our veterans losing?
As we know, the government has failed our veterans at every turn. The Minister of Veterans Affairs did not understand that Memorial Day was on July 1 in Newfoundland and Labrador. She did not understand that every memorial service we have on Remembrance Day across Canada on November 11 needs wreaths. The Liberals wanted MPs to have only two, even though in my riding there are 20 Remembrance Day services. They did not think that was important, because as long as they had enough for their big-city Remembrance Day services, that was fine.
This has all been unacceptable. We need the minister to come clean as to where these cuts are coming from. The budget is vague, and the dollars just are not there.
We also question whether or not the government can actually spend this money. We know that in the Department of National Defence, over the last 10 years of the Liberals, over $10 billion in defence spending has lapsed. Whether it has been Mr. Sajjan, the former minister of defence, or someone else, the Liberals always get up and say that they will make sure any money that is not used in one fiscal year will be repurposed for use in the next year or the year after that.
I can tell the House that, in subsequent years, of the dollars available of the $10 billion that lapsed, they have been able to earmark only $110 million. Only 10% of the dollars that have lapsed have ever gone back to be invested in the defence budget. The rest of the money of course was turned back into general revenue and used on other Liberal pet projects. Therefore for defence, if there is $9 billion there, maybe $4.2 billion is coming from Veterans Affairs, but I can tell you that if they do not spend it, they will claw it back, because that is what the Liberals do with respect to defence.
The other way the Liberals are going to try to get the numbers up, and we already know this, is through creative accounting. They are great at creative accounting when they start talking about how they are going to get to 2%. We know that in 2017-18, when they first started doing creative accounting, all veterans' pensions became national defence spending, so there is nothing there in capabilities.
We know they actually moved some Coast Guard spending over, as well as some Global Affairs Canada spending. I can say that in 2017-18, they moved $47 million from the Coast Guard into national defence. That then increased to $759 million just a couple of years ago. This year, they moved the entire department of the Canadian Coast Guard, which does icebreaking, navigation, search and rescue, ocean mapping and environmental research. Now, all of a sudden, that is all defence spending. They have moved over $2.4 billion into national defence, while adding no new defensive capabilities for the Canadian Armed Forces.
We also know that in this budget, the Liberals are transferring aviation services from Transport Canada. We do not even know how much that is yet, but it is still more of the shell game. They are going to take from this department and from that department and move it over, so there is absolutely no transparency. The reason they can do that is that there has been a new change at NATO, which is that any spending under the Department of National Defence, whether civilian salaries or anything else, can count toward NATO spending.
I am just waiting for the government to say that the national child care program is going to national defence or old age security pensions will go to national security. That is how we are going to get to 2%. We know the Liberals cannot be trusted to make the investments we need.
In the budget, the Liberals talked about retiring some of our older fleets that are costing too much money to maintain. The deputy minister of national defence and the chief of the defence staff said in a release, “We are reviewing these savings to assess what they mean for our organization. Work to implement them will only begin if the Budget has the support of Parliament, so we will share additional information with you once the House of Commons’ debate and vote take place.”
They do not even know what the government is doing, what fleets we are going to retire and how we are going to fill any capability gaps that are occurring. Are they parking our old Victoria-class submarines even though we will still be waiting years before we get our next new submarines? Are they going to park the rest of our Leopard tanks, which are in poor condition, and then not have any tanks here in Canada for training or for getting ready in case there is a conflict? Are they also retiring the Cyclone helicopters, which are abandoned?
There are so many questions about this budget and how it is not making our Canadian Armed Forces stronger and better able to protect Canada.
