The Budget
Date: 2023_04_18
Chamber: HOUSE OF COMMONS
Mr. Luc Berthold: I am sure that all of my colleagues will be delighted with the words I have chosen for my speech. I am sure they all want to hear it, as do the majority of Canadians. It is important to be able to repeat things that have been said here and to be able to listen to them carefully, because sometimes they come back to haunt us. I am going to start with a quote from someone who said, "let me be very clear. We are absolutely determined that our debt-to-GDP ratio must continue to decline and our deficits must continue to be reduced. The pandemic debt we incurred to keep Canadians safe and solvent must [and will] be paid down. This is our fiscal anchor. This is a line we will not cross. It will ensure that our finances remain sustainable." That sounds good. That is great. It seems serious. Who said that? It was not an analyst on television or an economist. It was the Minister of Finance . She did not say that a long, long time ago; she said it when presenting the 2022-23 budget just a year ago. Let us look at this quote and analyze it a little to see what it means. The first statement is, "let me be very clear. We are absolutely determined that our debt-to-GDP ratio must continue to decline". She was talking about the 2023 budget. One year later, has the minister demonstrated resolve? It seems not. According to the 2023-24 budget, the debt-to-GDP ratio will increase from 42.4% to 43.5% in 2023-24. It will also be greater than 42.4% in 2024-25. In the two years since this statement was made, the Minister of Finance was unable to maintain her resolve not once, but twice, with regard to her fiscal anchor, which was to ensure that the debt-to-GDP ratio would continue to decline. The facts presented in the budget are simple. Canada's federal debt for 2023-24 is expected to reach $1.22 trillion. These are not numbers we are used to saying. One trillion is a thousand billion. When we talk about $1.22 trillion, that means 1,022 billion dollars. That is nearly $81,000 per Canadian household. Canada's budgetary projections show no path to balance. The deficit for 2022-23 is $43 billion. In 2023-24, the deficit will reach $40.1 billion. The fall economic statement projected a surplus of $4.5 billion in 2027-28. The 2023 budget projects nothing but deficits. The current projection is a $14-billion deficit in 2027-28. That was the year we were supposed to have a balanced budget, according to the Minister of Finance . As I was saying, she lacked resolve. Let us continue with another sentence from this statement by the Minister of Finance. She said that the pandemic debt we incurred to keep Canadians safe and solvent must and will be paid down. That is firm, clear and precise. I may have a quick lesson for the Minister of Finance. To pay down a debt, people have to start by paying it down. To pay it down, they have to stop borrowing money. To stop borrowing money, they have to stop adding new spending. The reality of budget 2023-24 is that public spending has again increased by more than $120 billion over pre-pandemic spending. In 2019, federal program spending was $323 billion. In 2023-24, expenditures will reach $447 billion. That is a far cry from paying back pandemic debt. We are spending even more money than we spent before the pandemic. The budget makes no mention of paying down the pandemic debt. Things have certainly changed after just a year. The words "pay down" seem to have disappeared from the Minister of Finance 's vocabulary, even though he had given us a bit of hope last year. Unfortunately, it seems that nature has resumed its course. It probably came galloping back following a meeting between the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister , the biggest spender in the history of Canada. Indeed, it is good to remember that the Prime Minister has accumulated more debt than all the other previous prime ministers of this country combined. He has no plan for balancing the budget and bringing his inflationary deficits under control. Inflationary deficits are the reason behind the rising day-to-day costs of the goods we buy and the interest rates we pay. I am going to read out another statement related to what I was talking about earlier, and this one really important. In the 2022 budget, when speaking about the debt-to-GDP ratio that I mentioned earlier, the Minister of Finance said that this was the fiscal anchor, the line that should not be crossed in order to ensure that our finances remain sustainable. We are in trouble. As I said earlier, the Minister of Finance herself has crossed this uncrossable line twice, for both the coming year and the next year. She made it clear that exceeding the current debt-to-GDP ratio would make Canada's finances unsustainable. According to our own finance minister, the Prime Minister's debt and inflationary deficits keep rising. In 2021-22, debt servicing costs were $24.5 billion. The Prime Minister's inflationary spending caused interest rates to climb, which increased the cost of debt servicing in Canada. Who is going to pay for all that? Not I, but rather our children and our children's children, in short, everyone will to some extent. Even today, the cost of repaying the debt is so high that we will no longer be able to pay for all the promises and all the spending that the government keeps adding. In my opinion, the finance minister has lost all credibility because she probably abdicated her responsibility to ensure Canada's finances were viable, healthy and above all realistic for future generations. This is evident and has been demonstrated. It is not too surprising because the Minister of Finance was probably following her Prime Minister's example. We have had the chance to talk about this several times since the beginning of the budget debate. In 2015, the Prime Minister was elected after making his grand promise to run small deficits, very small deficits. He promised to run a deficit of $10 billion the first year, $10 billion the second year, $6 billion or $7 billion the following year and then go back to a balanced budget. The Prime Minister made that promise in order to get elected, obviously. He said it because interest rates were low. He said that interest rates would never go up, that we were in a good period, that everything was going well and that we could afford to borrow money. That is not what happened in the least. Let us not forget that the Prime Minister said that budgets balance themselves. The Minister of Finance probably thought that a return to a balanced budget would happen on its own. Unfortunately, the reality of the economic situation we are experiencing around the world caught up with her. Here is the Prime Minister's latest and probably worst statement. In front of a group of young people, the Prime Minister tried to justify his propensity for borrowing by urging young people to use their credit cards at 19% interest to pay their rent and invest in their education. That was the Prime Minister's wise counsel to a group of young people who came to hear him speak. It is not surprising today that the finance minister has put us in a situation where our federal finances are no longer viable. The only way to fix the situation is to elect a responsible Conservative government in the next election.