Maxime Bernier

[International Trade, May 5th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, unlike the New Democrats, who do nothing to promote trade, we have reached agreements with over 38 countries since we took office. We have always protected and promoted the supply management system. Poultry, egg and dairy producers are in good stead, and we are going to continue to defend all of Canada's industries.

[The Budget, April 22nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, we realize that Canadians have debt. That is a fact. That is why we want to lower their taxes, so that they can pay down this debt and have more money in their pockets. That is a no-brainer. That is also why we created the TFSA, the tax-free savings account, to help them save tax-free money for the future.

I would like to tell my colleague that more than half of the people who have tax-free savings accounts earn less than $42,000 a year. I would consider that the middle class. They benefit from the ability to invest in a tax-free savings account.

If we look at all of the measures for families in this budget, an average Canadian family with two kids—so four people—will save $6,600 in taxes this year.

[The Budget, April 22nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his question.

As a Quebecker, I am very proud that we have increased transfers to the provinces every year. It is important to mention that. Quebec, my own province, today will receive more than $20 billion in federal transfers.

That includes $10 billion in equalization payments, because Quebec is a have-not province that receives money from the other provinces. My personal hope is that Quebec will become a have province and will no longer require equalization payments. However, Quebec receives $10 billion in equalization payments and $10 billion in health and social transfers. This money makes it possible for the Quebec government to balance its budget, which it is currently in the process of doing.

It is also a matter of fairness for Canadians so that they can have the same services across the country. That is why we have an equalization formula. It allows the poorest provinces to provide the same services as the richest provinces. I can reassure all Canadians that we have increased all transfers to Canadian provinces and that they will continue to increase at the rate of inflation.

[The Budget, April 22nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I was talking about consumer debt related to credit cards. What matters most is the relationship between consumer debt from credit cards and deficits accumulated during periods of economic growth. When one has consumer debt, it is important to pay it off before taking on more. We already have a huge debt, and the leader of the Liberal Party wants to increase the deficit and put future generations further into debt.

We, however, think that Canadians are responsible. When they have credit card debt, they want to pay it off first in order to enjoy life. As the saying goes, “He who pays his debts grows rich.” That is what matters. That is what the federal government is doing and what families are doing.

We are encouraging people to save using tax-free savings accounts. This allows Canadians, once they have paid off their debts, to accumulate wealth and save without paying taxes.

[The Budget, April 22nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, it is simple. We told Canadians that we would freeze employer and employee contributions to employment insurance and that is what we did.

The good news is that in the budget, we told entrepreneurs and Canadians that we would gradually lower their employment insurance contributions in 2016-17 and 2017-18. That is a responsible policy.

I disagree with my colleague when he says that we cleared the deficit with unfair budget measures. We cleared the deficit by making tough decisions, going after tax evasion and ensuring that Canadian public servants have benefits equivalent to those of Canadian workers who pay for their benefits.

I am talking about sick leave for people who are truly sick, not for people who are well enough to work. We are going to allow our public servants to have short-term sick leave and make sure they do not get any more benefits than the rest of Canadians get. The Government of Canada will save $900 billion by doing so.

[The Budget, April 22nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak to the House and Canadians who are watching.

I want to let all Canadians know that I am very proud of what my government did in the last budget and for future generations. Our government's most spectacular achievement is the reduction of the tax burden on Canadians. The ratio of government revenue to GDP is at its lowest level in more than 50 years. I think that is a great achievement.

The leader of the Liberal Party promises to reverse this trend. He wants to take back the tax cuts that we gave to Canadians. We want to shrink the government, to give Canadians back their freedom, but the Liberals with their leader want to shrink Canadians' paycheques and take away their freedoms. The Liberals are very clear on what their priorities are. It is not cutting taxes for Canadians. They want to spend more money. They want to spend money to stimulate the economy when we are not in a recession. The leader of the Liberal Party and his finance critics have repeatedly refused to rule out running a deficit again for many more years if they are elected.

The leader of the Liberal Party is saying things about the economy that, for an economist, sound a bit bizarre. When he referred to the government budget last year, he said that there is no need to worry about the deficit, we should aim rather at stimulating the economy and the budget would balance itself.

For the leader of the Liberal Party, the more a government spends, the more it stimulates the economy, the more its revenues will grow and the less we need to worry about the deficit. For him, let us spend our way to prosperity. No, seriously, Canadians know that if we all spend more than we have, we will not get richer. It is called living beyond our means.

I think we have to wonder why the deficit and the debt exploded in the 1970s when his father was the leader of the Liberal Party. Perhaps they were not spending enough. They were spending a lot of money, but it did not create any growth. At the last Liberal convention, they had an economic adviser, Larry Summers. He said that it was alright for a government to spend because we need unconventional support policies for the economy. This is economic jargon for spending without restraint. According to him, accumulating more debt is okay when it serves to stimulate the economy, when we do not have a recession.

We all know that more spending and more borrowing will not act as an economic stimulus but rather as an economic sedative. Less money will be available for the private sector, and it is only private sector entrepreneurs who create wealth.

What the leader of the Liberal Party said yesterday was that he wants to reverse and abolish all tax cuts we are giving to Canadian entrepreneurs. He just said that a couple of minutes ago and he also said the same thing in a video released last year.

The leader of the Liberal Party explained that households and provincial governments in Canada are heavily indebted while the federal government has considerably lowered its debt levels since the 1990s. According to the leader of the Liberal Party, Ottawa is the only entity that has room to rack up more debt. It should therefore step up and spend more to stimulate the economy, when we do not need any stimulus.

For me, this is like a couple who has racked up a large amount of consumer debt on credit cards. They check the invoices for their three credit cards and the husband says to his wife, “We have reached our limit on these two cards, but we still have some credit left on this third one, so we can get richer if we max out this one, too. Let's go shopping.” Can anyone imagine a more absurd economic policy?

The leader of the Liberal Party seems to forget that it is the same taxpayers who will have to pay back the debt of all levels of government, municipal, provincial and federal, as well as their own. I am very proud that our government took control of the debt. The debt-to-GDP ratio is at 33% and our goal is to have that ratio at 25% a couple of years from now. At 33%, we have the best performance of all G7 countries.

For Conservatives, debt is not something abstract. Servicing the debt costs taxpayers about $30 billion a year. This is as much money as the GST brings to government coffers. For us, the more we cut down the size of the debt, the fewer resources we will need to pay the interest, and the more we will be able to afford to cut taxes for Canadians.

The leader of the Liberal Party and his American advisers still believe in the old Canadian theory that says that government can create wealth by spending more money. If the government injects money into the economy, where does it come from? It is not falling from the sky. In reality, every time the government takes an additional $1 in taxes out of someone's pockets, it is $1 that person would not be able to spend or invest. When government spending goes up, private spending goes down. There is no wealth creation.

Government borrowing has the same effect. It is like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of the swimming pool and emptying it in the shallow end. Nothing happens. It is this kind of policy that ruined our economy in the 1970s. Prosperity, we all know, does not come from government spending but from entrepreneurial investing. To stimulate the economy, we need to give entrepreneurs the means to create wealth. We need to put in place the best possible conditions to allow the private sector to become more productive by curtailing public spending, cutting taxes, reducing the burden of regulation and signing free trade agreements. Growth and progress depend on economic freedom through less government intervention in our day-to-day lives.

More government spending is not the answer to our social and economic challenges. The task is not to reinvent government; the task is to limit government. Conservatives believe in a smaller government, but the Liberals want a big government because they elevate the government and downgrade the citizens. We want a small government because, ultimately, we support individual freedom and personal responsibility. We have faith in people. We have faith that they have the ability, the dignity and the right to make their own decisions with their money and to determine their own destinies.

Soon it will be a time for choosing. People will have to decide if they want to go back to more spending, more borrowing and more debt, and maybe some constitutional crisis because the leader of the Liberal Party wants to interfere in provincial jurisdiction, in education. He said that education is important. We know that education is important, but education is a provincial jurisdiction. He wants to do like his father did and play in the provincial jurisdiction. Conservatives respect the Constitution and think that education is very important for Canadians. This is why we will not interfere in provincial jurisdiction. The provinces know better how to deal with that.

The time will come for Canadians to choose in a couple of months from now. They will have the choice between stability, a steady economic hand under the leadership of the Prime Minister, or instability and maybe some constitutional crisis with leader of the Liberal Party, instability because they want to spend the money we do not have to stimulate the economy when stimulus is not needed because we are not in a recession.

What are we going to do? In the last budget we tabled the balanced budget act. We want to ensure the next generation that nobody will spend money we do not have to create jobs when we know that it is the private sector that is going to do that. It is not the government, it is the private sector. We believe in entrepreneurs. That is why we want to cut their taxes and we also want to cut taxes for all Canadians.

I was very disappointed by the reaction of the leader of the Liberal Party. I know he is taking his advice from an American economist. If we look at what happened in the U.S. a couple of years ago, I think it had the wrong policy. Right now, we have the right policy for the future.

I am very proud of our budget. It was hard to achieve a balanced budget. It was not easy because budgets do not balance themselves, as the opposition leader likes to claim. It takes hard work. In 2006, as soon as this government took power, we began to manage Canada's budget responsibly, we created surpluses, we took control of expenses, and we allocated money—$33 billion—to the public debt.

We went through a global economic crisis that started in the United States and other countries. That affected Canada because businesses export their products to the United States and around the world. They do that because people like their products, which are made very efficiently, making them competitive in foreign markets.

However, when something happens in another country, these entrepreneurs are affected indirectly. We had to create a stimulus program, because we were in a recession, to stimulate the economy. At the time, we told Canadians that it would be temporary and that it was meant to stimulate the economy, but because future generations would have to pay for these current debts, we wanted to stimulate the economy through infrastructure programs that would benefit future generations. That is what we did. We created an infrastructure program that involved considerable spending to meet the country's needs and ensure that future generations could also benefit, but it was a short-term, very targeted stimulus program.

Now we are returning to a balanced budget. How did we do it? We controlled our spending. We froze operating expenditures across the Government of Canada. We imposed the freeze because we knew it was the right thing to do. For politicians, sometimes it is easier to raise taxes to have money and create programs, but that is not the right solution. The solution is to leave money in people's pockets. They are the ones who create wealth. That is why we froze the government's operating budget.

We also fought against tax evasion because the tax system has to be fair for all Canadians. We fought against tax evasion and created good policies. A number of my cabinet colleagues around the table had to make cuts in their respective portfolios because it was our responsibility. We had to get back to a balanced budget, as we promised Canadians we would.

We did the opposite of the previous Liberal government, which eliminated the deficits created by the Trudeau government in the 1970s and inherited by the Mulroney government. Nonetheless, the Mulroney government set the stage for creating wealth by signing free trade agreements. As hon. members will recall, the Liberals were against free trade with the U.S. That free trade agreement made Canada prosper.

We modernized Canada's tax system. When Jean Chrétien's Liberals came to power, everything was in place for revenues to come in to the federal government, provided that spending was under control. Instead of clearing the deficit by looking to their own backyard, they offloaded their deficit onto the provinces. Quebeckers remember the cuts to health care and social services. Mr. Chrétien's Liberal Party cleared its deficit on the backs of the provinces and Canadians. We dealt with our own deficit by making the courageous decisions that needed to be made. That is why I am proud of my government.

Now that our country is prosperous, we have to make sure that Canadians can keep their money in their pockets. What have we done? Since we believe in families and Canadians, we have lowered taxes for Canadians, Canadian families and seniors. This is a fair budget. We have implemented income splitting. Why allow families to split their income? It is a question of fairness, because couples in similar situations should pay the same amount of tax.

For example, a dual-income family earning $80,000 paid less tax than a single-income family earning the same amount. The single-income family paid more taxes. Couples in families with similar incomes were treated differently. We have solved this problem of discrimination.

We have instituted income splitting for seniors as well. Canadians like and use these measures. We have also made it possible for Canadians to shelter savings from taxes thanks to the tax-free savings account. Of those who have opened a TFSA, 60% earn less than $60,000. That is the middle class. The middle class benefits from these measures. Thanks to economic freedom, the middle class can continue to create wealth.

That is the difference between us, the Liberals and the NDP: we believe in people. If Canada is great and beautiful, it is thanks to Canadians. Canadians make this a great and beautiful country. Canadians work hard and make it possible to have the standard of living that we currently enjoy.

The government makes sure that we have a social network and social programs to meet the needs of Canadians, but prosperity comes from Canadians. That is the difference between us and the opposition parties, which want to tax Canadians. More taxes and more deficits lead to more debt. That debt will have to be repaid in the near future. What is irresponsible is creating debt and deficits in a time of economic prosperity.

That is why we have introduced a bill to mandate balanced budgets in Canada. A balanced budget holds politicians here in the House of Commons accountable. It is easy for a politician to spend money, and as Milton Friedman said, if you are spending somebody else's money you often give bigger gifts.

I want to add that Keynesian measures do not enrich our country. A country gets richer through tax measures that put money back into people's pockets.

Economic prosperity is good for all Canadians, and I would compare it to a rising tide. John F. Kennedy famously likened economic prosperity to a rising tide, saying that when a country becomes prosperous and there is economic growth, it is like a rising tide that lifts all boats.

We need to promote economic prosperity, and that is what this budget does. That is why we are proud of it.

This budget also keeps the government's promises. As the member for Beauce, I personally promised the people of my riding that our government would eliminate the deficit, make sure that we returned to a balanced budget and cut taxes.

Today, I am proud to be able to go back to the people of Beauce and tell them that that mission has been accomplished. We eliminated the deficit, we balanced the budget, we are lowering their taxes and we are going to continue to do so in the future. We say so in our plan.

Next year, we will have a surplus of $1.4 billion. That money will go into the pockets of taxpayers through other tax cuts, but some of it will go to helping future generations. We want to be responsible and so we will use our surpluses to pay part of the debt so that future generations do not have too heavy a burden to bear.

I am very proud to rise in the House today and show Canadians that they have a choice to make in the coming weeks. That choice will be very clear when the next election takes place: prosperity or debt, lower taxes or higher taxes, failure to comply with the Constitution and interference in other jurisdictions by the NDP and the Liberals or compliance with the Constitution, economic prosperity or economic uncertainty.

The choice is clear. The past is an indication of what the future holds. We have managed the government's budget very effectively, and we are going to continue to do so.

[The Budget, April 22nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the leader of the Liberal Party.

He gave a nice speech about Canada. I would like to tell him that those are fine words, but that in reality, Canada would not enjoy the same economic prosperity if we were to take his approach because it involves spending money that the government does not have. He wants to spend even more money on infrastructure programs than we are doing now, using borrowed money. Like me, the opposition leader knows that today's debts are tomorrow's taxes. What is certain is that Canadians will pay even more taxes under a Liberal government.

How can he justify raising taxes for Canadians and cancelling tax cuts as a way to create prosperity in Canada?

[Intergovernmental Relations, April 22nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, what do Quebeckers want? Quebeckers want more money in their pockets.

We have lowered taxes for Quebeckers. What does the Government of Quebec want? It wants a federal government that respects the Canadian Constitution. We respect the Canadian Constitution. There are no squabbles. Under the leadership of our Prime Minister we have constitutional peace. What do Quebeckers want? They want stability—not instability under the NDP, which wants to make Quebeckers' taxes even higher.

We increased transfers to the provinces. It is untrue to say that transfers were cut; they were increased. Quebec receives $20 billion in transfers.

[Agriculture and Agri-Food, April 22nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, on the contrary, the agri-food sector, farmers, small business owners and Canada's middle class, everyone benefits from this budget because we are lowering their taxes. It is simple. What the NDP wants to do is clear: it wants to spend money that we do not have and give it to public servants who will create inefficient programs.

We are giving money to business owners and Canadians. We are helping them create wealth and that is why with us the future is stable and with the opposition it is unstable.

[The Budget, April 22nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, that is utterly false. The fact is that we are reducing taxes for seniors and reducing taxes for entrepreneurs, including entrepreneurs in Beauce, Quebec and across Canada. We are putting money back in their pockets so they can stimulate the economy. In contrast, the opposition thinks that a big government that spends money it does not have and racks up debt for future generations will stimulate the economy. That is not true. It would actually slow the economy.