Madam Speaker, what a pleasure to have the opportunity to speak to this bill for the budget implementation act. I listened carefully to the previous speaker from the Liberal Party and wanted to say a couple of things in regard to working with him. I note, with appreciation, that back in 2017, he was the only Liberal member of Parliament who broke the whip on the Canadian autism partnership and voted in support of it in 2017, along with members from all of the opposition parties. I very much appreciate him for that.
I also appreciated the member quoting Wayne Gretzky. In my previous life before I was a member of Parliament, I worked for the Edmonton Oilers for a decade, and so I very much appreciated that speech. I loved the quote that he used. One of the things that was key to Wayne Gretzky's success was practice. His father had a reputation for building a rink in their backyard and Wayne would go out for hours on end just practising. One of the keys to practising, of course, is repeating something learned from the past, which is where I will turn my comments to now.
The member said that in regards to where we are going right now that it “might end badly.” This is of great concern to members on the Conservative side and to my constituents here in Edmonton—Wetaskiwin that this might end badly.
In regard to learning from the past, I was very interested when the Liberal member for Scarborough—Guildwood said that “in 1995, we were named as an honorary member of the third world.” I listened with interest because that was where I was planning to go with my own speech. Of course, in 1995, Canada's credit rating went down under the Chrétien and Martin Liberal government of the day. We slashed spending on things like health care, social services and education. We slashed international development spending; all of those things. Our spending was the lowest that it has been in my lifetime. I am concerned that that is where we are heading right now. I am going to talk a little bit about what got us there in 1995 and the late nineties where, as the member said, we were named as an honorary member of the third world. To find out what got us to that point, we will have to go back to the Trudeau government of 1968 and the seventies.
When Pierre Trudeau and his Liberal government came to power, there was almost no debt in Canada. There was very little debt, relative to where we are right now, and that Trudeau government decided to conduct an experiment. It decided that running perpetual deficits was a good idea. It ran deficits in 14 out of the 15 years that it was in power. Of course, when the Liberals were no longer in power, interest rates were at an all-time high. There have been some comments about interest rates in some of the speeches so far. However, interest rates were not at an all-time high the entire time the Liberals were in power. When they were making decisions to run their massive deficit experiment, interest rates were much lower.
To give context, in August of 1981, interest rates were at 20.78%, which was a disaster for Canada. That was just before the equally disastrous national energy program experiment that the Trudeau government at that time ran. In August of 1971, 10 years earlier, as the government was just in its third year of power, interest rates were at 5%. By August of 1976, interest rates had risen from 5% to 9.25%, and by August of 1981 they had gone up to 20.78%. Folks who think that interest rates are just going to remain low forever maybe need a little bit of a history lesson, maybe to go back in time and take a look at what happened in the 1970s.
There was a transition of power in 1984 to the Mulroney government and the Liberals, pre-pandemic, prior to the massive deficit spending, liked to point out that in previous decades the highest levels of debt were incurred under the Mulroney government. What they do not say is that the debt incurred, the deficits run up, under the Mulroney government were almost entirely interest on Pierre Trudeau's debt. The interest levels were so high that our biggest deficits in history were simply interest payments on the debt that Pierre Trudeau ran up. Of course, that bill came due and it came due more than a generation later than when the deficit started to be racked up by the Trudeau government. That debt came due in the late 1990s when, as the Liberal member for Scarborough—Guildwood pointed out, we were named as an honorary member of the third world.
I hope that we learn something today as we go down the road we are going down. We have to acknowledge that we are in a global pandemic and any government in power, any of the main parties, would be running large deficits at this point in time to deal with the challenge we are facing. The Conservative government back in 2008, 2009 and 2010 had to run fairly large deficits to deal with the global meltdown. The difference between now and then is that the Conservative government had a plan right from the start to get our budget back to balance.
We knew that we could not incur these deficits forever and that eventually, in the long-term interest of Canadians, we had to ensure we got our budget back to balance, so in 2008 we laid out a seven-year plan to get back to balance. In 2015 we got back to balance. We followed the plan to a T. I had the pleasure of serving on the cabinet committee from 2012 to 2105 that reviewed the plans of the government, ministers and departments to play their role in getting back to balance. We got back to balance by 2015 and that was the fiscal situation that the government of the day inherited.
If we look at this budget, where the government is on program spending, in 2014-15 program spending in the Conservatives' last year of government was $254 billion. Now let us look at 2019-20, pre-pandemic, before anybody knew what was going to happen. We should remember that the entire way through, Conservatives were asking the government if it was prepared for a future eventuality where the global economy was not as strong as it was. During this entire time of global strength in the economy relative to what it had been previously, rather than continue with a balanced budget and increased spending because of increased revenues that the government could then have the flexibility to spend on priorities of Canadians, it decided to rack up massive new spending. In 2014-15, program spending was $254 billion and by 2019-20, it was $349 billion, up $95 billion, 37.5%, in just five years. That is insane in terms of fiscal management. That was leading into the pandemic.
If we look at this budget, we are dealing with what we are dealing with now, but Canadians would expect to see a government that would have a plan for a post-pandemic world, for getting our finances in order and moving beyond the pandemic. In this budget, if we fast-forward to 2022-23, plans for spending after the pandemic is over, the government's projected program spending is $412 billion. We should remember that in the last year of the Harper government, it was $254 billion. Eight years later, the government plans program spending of $412 billion, an increase of over $150 billion, over 62%, in just eight years.
If we go back to the Trudeau government of the 1970s and look at the disaster its fiscal plan was for a future generation, my concern is that we are heading down that exact same path now with the current government. We need a change in direction. We need a plan from the government, even if it is a long-term plan, to get back to balance eventually so that we can again continue on the path that we were on in 2015, an upward trajectory where governments had the flexibility to spend on the priorities of Canadians.
