Pierre Poilievre

[Taxation, March 1st, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, the finance minister is like the rooster who thinks he made the sun come up just because he crowed when the sun came up.

In fact, he inherited temporary good fortune from oil prices that are up by 100%, a housing bubble in both Vancouver and Toronto, and massive household indebtedness, which has put our economy on a short-term sugar high. Why has the finance minister spent the cupboard bare in the short-term good times, leaving us so exposed to danger in the long-term future?

[Taxation, March 1st, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, talk is cheap, except when the current finance minister does it. Then it is very expensive. He said the deficit would be just $6 billion this year. Instead, it is $18 billion. He said it would be balanced next year. Now that will not happen for another quarter-century.

In fact, while he was delivering his budget speech, the national debt grew by $1.5 million. That is either too much spending or too much talking. Which is it?

[The Budget, February 28th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, the member is quite right. What actually matters to the well-being of any country is not simply the top line economic growth, but the per capita growth, because that is the amount of money in which all of the members of the country can share.

The government has been trumpeting last year's growth numbers, while failing to acknowledge that the vast majority of the causes for the growth are transient and temporary. One is that oil prices have basically doubled since 2014. Oil is roughly 6% of our economy. If we double the price of oil, members can imagine how that could influence the overall growth in the economy. We continue to have a sugar high from the overpriced housing sector, which is fuelled largely by debt. Finally, the American economy has been roaring, something that might not necessarily be to our advantage if NAFTA falls apart, or if the American economy decides to stumble again.

Those are all transient short-term benefits, and that is why the government ought to have done the responsible thing and used the resulting revenue boost to strengthen our foundation for the storm that may be coming at any time. Instead, the government has blown that fortune and left Canada more vulnerable than ever to risk.

[The Budget, February 28th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, this is something I have thought a lot about. We have in this country different provincial programs that offer drug plans to people who are of limited means. Some of them require that people be on social assistance. Others, like in British Columbia, are phased out very gradually as people earn more income. There is no doubt that in many provinces the clawbacks of drug benefits, of housing benefits, and of social assistance combined with taxation create marginal effective tax rates on the poorest people that can often exceed 100%. That is, for every extra dollar they earn, they actually lose more than a dollar. This is a particularly pernicious problem for people with disabilities.

That is why I have introduced the opportunity for workers with disabilities act, which would require the finance minister to do an assessment every year of how much people with disabilities are losing for every dollar they earn, and if they are losing more than gaining, then the minister would be required to introduce measures through the working income tax benefit, the disability tax credit, or others in order to redress that problem. It would further create a condition in the Canadian social transfer program that provinces do the same because we must all agree that work should always pay more and we should reward people for making the courageous decision to work.

[The Budget, February 28th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, I would rather not say the name because that family has a member in the House of Commons these days and it would be unparliamentary for me to name him. However, I believe that family has done more to build up Canada's national debt and thereby enrich the wealthy bondholders who collect interest on it than anyone else. I am sure that family gets regular Christmas cards from those bondholders, thanking them for all of that debt.

The member wants to talk about the housing market. No, we do not believe in bailouts. In fact, we have taken the opposite position. The Liberals want to bring in a bailout system through the infrastructure bank, which would require taxpayers to bail out large corporate construction investors in the event that their projects go belly-up. We are not the party of bailouts; they are the party of bailouts.

[The Budget, February 28th, 2018]

Madam Speaker, let us address the first question, on the culpability of Canada's national debt. I believe if the hon. member looks back on the record, the largest share of our national debt would be rung up by one family. Consider that for a few moments. Secondly—

[The Budget, February 28th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, it is said that talk is cheap. That is not the case with the government. When it talks, it is very expensive.

Just yesterday, the finance minister spoke for about 40 minutes. During that time, he also, simultaneously, added $1.5 million to our national debt. That is either too much talking, too much spending, or both. Either way, there sure is a lot of debt piling up to pay for it.

The Prime Minister promised a small deficit of $6 billion during the last campaign. It is $18 billion for this year, three times bigger than he said it would be. He said the deficit would be gone by next year, 2019. Now his finance department has said it will be at least another quarter century of deficits, for a total reaching almost a half a trillion dollars, and that assumes the Liberals do not add any new spending in next year's pre-election budget. How likely is that?

The Liberals have tried to comfort us by saying that we should not worry about growing debt because all of the money that has come in from the growing U.S. economy, the higher oil prices, the booming global economy, will allow us to keep our debt-to-GDP ratio lower than it was before. Let us discuss some of the risks associated with that assumption.

The government is ignoring the overall debt that Canadians must shoulder. The debt of the government is the debt of the people. There is no special debt-repayment machine that can service the interest on Canada's national debt, other than the taxpaying entrepreneurs and workers who pay the bills in the country. When it comes to their debt levels, there is very bad news. Canada has the highest levels of household debt-to-income ratios in the OECD. In fact, when we take the corporate, personal, and government debt of Canada and add it together, it is 300% the size of our entire economy, which is, this month, for the first time ever, the biggest in the OECD. We have now surpassed Greece as the most overall indebted people in the entire OECD.

What does that mean? It means that when interest rates go up, our families, our businesses, and our governments will be under a great deal of pressure.

The government has not planned for that eventuality. Rather, it has taken the good fortune it inherited, both in terms of a balanced budget on the day that it walked into the Prime Minister's Office at the Langevin Block and the unusual and almost unnatural coexistence of favourable international economic conditions for Canada. Let me share a few of them that normally do not ever go together.

We have both a low dollar and high oil prices. Oil prices have nearly doubled in the last three years, while the dollar has remained low. Therefore, we have a boost for our western producers, albeit one that is held back by a lack of market access, and a price advantage for our central Canadian manufacturing exporters. Very rarely do those two things simultaneously occur. We have a booming U.S. and world economy, yet we still have low interest rates. Again, those do not typically go together. However, in this very brief window they do.

Unfortunately, it will not stay that way. Already interest rates are going up south of the border. Just since September, the interest rate on the two-year U.S. government bond has nearly doubled, from about 1.2% to about 2.2%. That does not sound like a big deal. However, it means that the cost of borrowing for that government has gone up dramatically.

If bondholders want to lend to government and can get more interest from the government in Washington, they are going to demand more interest from the government in Ottawa. This means that Canadians would pay higher taxes to fund interest payments to those who lend to fund the government.

Simultaneously, interest rates on consumer debt are slowly starting to creep up. Interest rates on mortgage debt are slowly starting to increase. Our businesses will soon have to pay more for the debt they hold as a result of that ongoing phenomenon. The same taxpayers who are struggling under a burden of unprecedented and unmatched personal debt will simultaneously have to shoulder, through their taxation to the government, higher debt interest so that the Prime Minister can fund interest payments to bondholders.

Over the next five years, according to this budget, which is based on, I would suggest, very irresponsible projections over what interest costs will be, the government is going to be spending $9 billion more on debt interest in the year 2022 than it is today. Even if we believe those projections, that is an increase in the interest expense of the government of well over 35%. The cost of funding the debt will be $33 billion per year. That is money taxpayers contribute for which they get literally nothing in return. It goes out the door to lenders who have financed this short-term spending spree by the present-day government.

That assumes that there will be no sudden and unexpected increase in interest rates, which we have every reason to suspect there might be. If the rates go up faster than Finance Canada expects, then those numbers I just shared with the House will actually be an underestimation.

The second risk the government is failing to consider, the first being higher interest rates, is that this budget has left no room to address some of the obvious dangers that are staring all of us in the face. We are in the process of renegotiating a trade agreement with our number one customer. We sell $400 billion in goods and services to the United States of America, the equivalent of one-fifth of our entire economy. We have a $2-trillion economy, and we sell $400 billion to the Americans.

Imagine running a small business and learning that it might be losing its biggest client, who is responsible for one-fifth of all the company's revenue. Would we go out on a big borrowing binge at that moment in time, or would we stabilize our finances and prepare for the eventuality that the client, who has proven to be unpredictable, as is the relationship we currently have with our biggest customer, may no longer be buying our goods in the same numbers it has in the past? There is nothing in this budget to plan for that negative eventuality, even though we all acknowledge, even the government, if it is being honest, that the NAFTA negotiations are going badly and could finish with disastrous consequences for our economy.

We have massive housing bubbles in Toronto and Vancouver, a third danger for which the government is not preparing. If there were a significant correction in housing prices, it would affect the construction industry. It would mean that the net worth of households in those markets would dramatically decline. In some cases, they might be underwater on their mortgages. In other words, their homes could be worth less than the mortgages themselves. All of that would mean a big hit to federal government revenues and to the ability of the government to meet its own obligations, or, more importantly, to provide some relief to those families if such an eventuality were to occur. However, that danger is not accounted for in these numbers either.

It is like the government is assuming that the sunny ways will never be replaced by rainy days. It has done nothing to prepare for that rainy day. Instead of setting aside and squirrelling away our resources to prepare for trouble ahead, the Liberals have blown them in the present. They have spent tomorrow today.

That brings me to the final point I want to make on the subject of debt. We just heard a Liberal member across the way talk about social deficits and all these social shortcomings that need to be addressed. Of course, the Liberal solution to that is always more and more government, trickle-down government, the idea that it can scoop up all the tax dollars of the working class and the entrepreneurs. Politicians give it to bureaucrats and bureaucrats to interest groups, or, in the form of corporate welfare, to companies. The hope is that some of this money will trickle back down through the system to the very people who earned it in the first place.

Let us assume that there is a problem with social inequality in this country. How would a larger national debt affect those inequalities? Who holds the bonds in the Government of Canada? Are they the poor people, the suffering, the downtrodden? Are they even the aspiring and struggling working class? Of course not. Bonds in governments are overwhelmingly held by more affluent, and even rich, people. That is why we will always hear international bankers recommending that governments go into deficit. It makes perfect sense for them. They are the ones lending the money and getting the interest. They receive interest payments. The working class pays them. In that sense, debt interest is a wealth transfer. It is a form of redistribution from the working class to the super-rich.

By expanding the national debt, the government is carrying out a massive multi-billion dollar transfer from the have-nots to the have-yachts, from those with the least to those with the most. Once again we see that when government gets big, when the wealth of the nation is concentrated in the state, those with power and influence over the state always win or are always better off.

We on this side of the House of Commons believe in a merit-driven economy, where people get ahead through their hard work, where the free enterprise system allows everyone to do better by making everyone else better, a system where people make decisions with their own money rather than with the money of others.

It is a great irony that our friends across the way, who subscribe to seventies-style central planning, think that people should not be trusted with their own money but that a person should be trusted with other people's money. Who the Liberals want to control other people's money is always them. It is a self-serving and egotistical ideology to which they subscribe.

We on this side subscribe to a view that requires humility of government. We understand that the people who earn the money should keep the money rather than having politicians use the power of coercive taxation to extract it from them and spend it on their behalf. Simply put, as my leader has, we believe in putting people ahead of government in a system in which no one can get ahead except by making people better off by offering them something that is worth more than they had to pay to get it.

That is the free market system, and in reinstating that great free market tradition in this country, not only can we give everyone a chance to succeed but we can replace this notion of a modern-day aristocracy through big government with the notion of a meritocracy through the free market.

[The Budget, February 28th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, there is no question the Prime Minister has inherited great fortune, a strong world economy, and a doubling of oil prices, our American customers south of the border driving up demand, and the government is blowing every penny of it. The deficit is three times what the Liberals promised. The deficit will continue for a quarter century, and amount to almost half a trillion dollars in new debt.

I will ask for a third time, and maybe this time the Prime Minister can answer the question. In what year will the budget be balanced?

[The Budget, February 28th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, as is usual, the Prime Minister was wrong in the choice he presented them.

He said that the deficit this year would be $6 billion; instead, it is $18 billion, three times bigger. He said that next year the budget would be balanced, and now we learn that it will not be for another quarter of a century, during which time he will add, or some future government will add, a half a trillion dollars in debt, presuming there is no more spending.

Once again, when will the budget be balanced?

[The Budget, February 28th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister wants to talk about the budget. In what year will it be balanced?