Mr. Speaker, it is great to have this opportunity to participate in the debate today. I have listened intently to previous speakers. It is very interesting to hear the Liberals' questions and the different types of points they are trying to make in the debate.
We heard the member for Yukon a little while ago talking about the Harper record going back to the economic meltdown in 2008 and criticizing the Harper government's spending, which was many times less than what we are talking about right now. I was elected in 2006. The hon. member was around during that time as well. He might recall that during that time we could not spend enough to make Liberal members of Parliament happy. Certainly, one of the absolutely critical things we did was to lay out a road map during a very difficult time to get back to balanced budgets. We had a surplus leading up to that point, very different circumstances from what we find ourselves in at this point, and we laid out a seven-year plan to get back to budget balance. I had the opportunity to serve on the cabinet subcommittee that evaluated plans from departments and ministers to get back to balance, and I am pleased to say that by 2015 we maintained that schedule and got back to balance. There are no conversations right now with the current government on the long-term impact of the spending we are now undertaking.
There is a lot of talk about deficits and previous governments' deficits. When we take a look at the deficit cycle of governments from 1968 until today, it is easy to trace back exactly why we wound up having the fiscal situation and debt we have right now. We can go back to 1968 when we had almost no debt in this country. We had the Pierre Trudeau government at that time, which made a very deliberate decision to run deficits in 14 out of 15 years.
We ran those deficits in 14 out of 15 years, and then by 1984 the country was in crisis. Rates were through the roof. Interest rates were in the high teens and 20s. In the previous years the Liberals, like the current government, had run an absolutely disastrous energy plan, which was devastating to the people of my constituency in Alberta. Yes, in the Mulroney years the deficits were even higher, but if we look at those Mulroney years, those deficits were actually almost entirely made up of interest on Trudeau's debt. It is very important to understand that. Because interest rates were so high, the Mulroney deficits were almost entirely the interest on Trudeau's debt.
Then we fast-forward to the late nineties and another Liberal government, the Chrétien-Martin government. That generation of Canadians had to pay for the debt that was accumulated back in the seventies and early eighties under the Trudeau government. It was a generation later, and we can see there is a parallel here and a predictor of the future. The impact then was that the Trudeau-Martin Liberal government cut $35 billion from health care, social services and education transfers through the Canada health transfer and the Canada social transfer. There were devastating cuts down the road because of the spending that happened in the late sixties, the seventies and the eighties.
When we listened to question period today, it does not seem to matter what question is asked. All three main opposition parties can ask very legitimate questions about vaccines, testing or spending programs, and they are almost always answered with derision and condescension by the Prime Minister and other ministers, but particularly by the Prime Minister. Almost every question is met with an accusation of our playing political games, and again, it does not matter which party asks. Then we get this sort of throwaway line, without the ministers ever really answering the question about when vaccines might be coming, or answering the legitimate question today about how many Canadians would need to be vaccinated, and what the evidence shows, before we can start to come out of the lockdowns. These are things that my constituents desperately want to know.
We hear this throwaway line that the government has Canadians' backs. What does that actually mean? First of all, it is a line that gets used for almost every question without the person actually giving a response to the question. It is very calming. It is presented in a very calm fashion by someone who has clearly been trained in delivering lines, but it does not say anything.
If we look closely at that, when they say the government has Canadians' backs, it is not really the government that has Canadians' backs, it is not the Prime Minister who has Canadians' backs, but our kids and our grandkids who ultimately have Canadians' backs right now, because our kids and grandkids are going to be paying for the deficits we are running right now. It does not mean we should not be doing it. Absolutely, I think members from all sides, from all parties, believe that we should be spending and running a pretty significant deficit right now.
However, as we are putting forward these plans for spending, there needs to be some hope, some vision for the future, and a consideration, an acknowledgement at least, that the spending we are undertaking right now is a trade-off. There is going to be a trade-off from that spending down the road. In other words, future generations of Canadians are going to forgo a certain level of their quality of life because this money will have to be paid back, or money will have to be spent to pay for the interest charges on the debt we are incurring right now. That money will not be able to be spent on other things.
The previous speaker eloquently brought up the member for Carleton's question about interest rates, which has been asked a lot. I remember the night we had a debate with the finance minister and the opportunity to ask him those questions. There was a complete refusal to acknowledge that interest rates can go up at some point in the future and that there might be a cost to that.
If we take a look at the interest rates in the situation we saw in the 1970s, there is a clear lesson in this. Back in August 1971, the interest rate in Canada, the overnight rate, was 5%. By August 1976, the interest rate was 9.25%. That was very high, obviously. However, it was nothing, because by August 1981 the interest rate had risen to an astonishing 20.78%.
The lesson for us here is that in August 1971 the Trudeau government would never have envisioned an interest rate of 20.78% as it was just starting on the road of ramping up its deficits. In 1976, things had started to get out of control; things had changed in the energy market and there were all sorts of factors that were leading to that interest rate going up, but the government had kind of lost control a little.
By 1981, we were in a spiral. At the same time, there was a national energy program that was devastating on the revenue side. I will not have enough time to get into that. Maybe someone could ask me a question about it and the parallel it has with our policy today. I would love to have that opportunity.
By 1981, we had a 20.78% interest rate, and ever since that time, governments have run deficits or we have had significant debt in this country, and we have been making interest payments on the debt that was run up during that time and forgone the opportunity to pay for things that we could have used those revenues for.
I have lots of other things I could say. I could talk about the government's absolute inability to generate innovation or take advantage of the substantial innovative capacity here in Canada around testing and the development of rapid testing, the development and procurement of vaccines, and the possibility that spending on those things early on might have resulted in a decreased need to spend the $30 billion a month we are spending on support programs right now.
I will wrap up here and look forward to taking questions from my colleagues.
