Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Winnipeg North for being so gracious in allowing me to participate in this debate today.
I am very pleased to speak to Bill C-97, the government's budget implementation act. It allows me the opportunity to examine in some detail why the Liberal government should not be re-elected this October. I say that because the government, if nothing else, has exhibited a litany of broken promises since 2015. Allow me to explain and highlight just a few of them.
As many Canadians may remember, during the election campaign in 2015, one of the many promises the Liberals made was to end what they called the undemocratic practice of introducing omnibus budget bills. What did we see this year? We saw another in a series of omnibus budget bills. In fact, the budget bill tabled this year is over 700 pages in length, making it the most lengthy budget bill ever introduced in parliamentary history. So much for stopping the practice of introducing omnibus budget bills.
I only note this as an example of one of the Liberals' broken promises. There are many more.
I will spend a little time on the second example, which is the most alarming of all the broken promises from the Liberals. This is the promise they made in 2015 to run, only for a three-year period, modest deficits of no more than $10 billion. They also promised that by the year 2019, the fourth year in their four-year mandate, they would return to balanced budgets. It is now 2019 and where are we? Do we have a balanced budget? We certainly do not. In fact, we have the furthest thing from it.
What is truly alarming is that on multiple occasions in committee, the finance minister of our country admitted that not only would we not return to balanced budgets in the foreseeable future, but he did not know when we might.
Let us think about that for just a second. I want all Canadians to think about that as well. The finance minister, who is arguably the second most influential person in Canada with respect to setting economic and fiscal policy, will not say when the budget will be balanced. More troubling is that he cannot because he does not know. The finance minister of Canada does not know when this country might return to balanced budgets. That is far more alarming to me than any pronouncement that any finance minister has made in recent history.
I could have understood if the finance minister would have said that he did not see the country returning to a balanced budget in the next five to 10 years or perhaps even in the next 15 years because of the economic and fiscal direction the government wished to pursue. However, it is more than just troubling for the finance minister to admit that he does not know when the country will return to a balanced budget because he cannot project that far into the future.
All Canadian taxpayers should think about that long and hard, and I hope they do. I hope that come October, they will remember this broken promise. Our country deserves better than a finance minister who does not know when his own budget might be balanced. It is almost unconscionable for a man in his position to admit that, yet that is the case before us.
It is not just the fact that the Liberals broke a promise on omnibus bills and their introduction in Parliament. It is not just the fact that they promised only modest deficits, and they have broken that promise. The Liberals have broken promises on things like electoral reform. They have broken promises on elements such as supporting the oil and gas sector in Canada, something on which the Liberals have deliberately, in my view, misled Canadians.
Let me give a couple of examples of what I say and what I mean by not supporting the oil and gas sector. Almost immediately upon forming government in 2015, the Liberal government killed northern gateway, a project that if it were up and running today, would be bringing untold billions of dollars to the Canadian economy and increasing the price of oil that we could have sold on the world market. However, the Liberal government unilaterally killed a project that had previously been approved by the National Energy Board.
In addition to that, the Liberal government, looking at the proposed energy east project, changed the regulatory provisions contained in the legislation and made upstream and downstream emissions something that had to be considered by the NEB, to the point where TransCanada pulled completely out of that project. That project, which could have been a nation-building project, delivering oil from western Canada to the east coast to their refineries to reduce our dependency on foreign oil, because of the Liberal government, was killed.
What is left? It is the infamous Trans Mountain Kinder Morgan project. The Liberal government has no intention, in my view, of following through on its promise to get that built. Right now, again in my opinion, the Liberal Party is simply doing electoral calculus on how many votes it can gain by not committing to completing this project before the next election. If the Liberals feel they can get more votes in British Columbia and Quebec by stopping this project, then that is what they are going to do.
This is nothing more than a political exercise, but the collateral damage is Canadians, particularly in western Canada, in my province of Saskatchewan and my neighbouring province of Alberta. The energy-producing provinces of the country are the collateral damage of the Liberal government's refusal to honour a promise.
Last but certainly not least, I would point out for all Canadians who may be listening to this debate what the Liberals did with the SNC scandal, as it is now known. The budget implementation bill included, buried deep within that bill, a provision that would allow the government, should it so wish, to introduce something called a DPA, a deferred prosecution agreement. The Liberals did that because the government had been lobbied extensively by SNC-Lavalin and they thought that by introducing it in the bill, it would allow the prosecutors office an opportunity to offer a DPA to SNC-Lavalin. That did not happen, and we know what the results were: the biggest scandal in Canadian political history in the last three decades, which resulted in the former attorney general of Canada resigning, because of the inappropriate pressure put on her by the government, and in the former Treasury Board president resigning in protest over the government's handling of that very key element of the budget implementation bill.
I could go on for quite some considerable time, but I have limited time before me. Let me just conclude by going back to my opening remarks when I said that in my opinion the government did not deserve to be re-elected. I can assure the House and anyone else who may be listening to this debate that in slightly less than six months, Canadians will be able to prove my prediction to be quite accurate.
