Budget Implementation Act, 2023, No. 1
Date: 2023_04_25
Chamber: HOUSE OF COMMONS
Mr. Kyle Seeback: I will be splitting my time with the member for Wellington--Halton Hills , who is actually my neighbour. His riding is right beside mine. In talking about the budget, we should look at some numbers. The first number I want to talk about is $176 billion. Government spending is up $176 billion since 2015. That is a 63% increase in government spending in eight years. We might ask ourselves what all this spending has done for Canadians. It is a very reasonable question. That is a massive increase. If I increased my home budget by 63%, I am going to guess my spouse and children might look around and ask, "Since the budget is way up, what is better? Have things gotten better here?" Let us look at what all this spending has done for Canadians. Right now, there is a $176-billion growth in government spending per year, and one in five Canadians is now skipping meals because life is so expensive and unaffordable. I was not an A student when I went to university, but I am smart enough to understand that this is a problem. Let us look at this other number: 1.5 million Canadians are now using the food bank. Let us go back. There is $176 billion more in government spending, and the result is that 1.5 million Canadians are using the food bank. We can take that part out of the equation. Affordability is actually being able to buy groceries and live. We know that the affordability question is awful after all this government spending. Every Canadian we talk to would say that life is unaffordable. However, we can put that aside for just one second. Let us talk about something else that is important for Canadians. We can talk about rent. Rent has almost doubled since 2015. There is $176 billion more being spent, and one needs to pay twice as much for rent. We can imagine what that does to a family's ability to make ends meet. Families are now paying twice as much in rent. Have their paycheques gone up? Have they doubled? No, they absolutely have not, but the rent has. It is the same thing if one wants to buy a house. Since houses are now so expensive and have gone up so much under the government, one now needs to put twice as much down as a down payment. People are thinking that their rent is terrible and unaffordable; maybe they should get out of the rental market and buy a house. What happens then? Now they need to have twice as much money as a down payment to buy that house. Again, after eight years of the Liberal government, $176 billion more is being spent per year. When we look at affordability, or the ability to make ends meet, Canadians are skipping meals and going to the food bank. On that metric, it is an F. Let us look at what else is going on, such as with housing. Housing is extremely important. Rents have doubled. If someone wants to buy a house, they find that down payments have doubled. A recent survey showed that nine in 10 Canadians who do not own a house think they never will. We can let that sink in for a second. That is how bad it is. This is after eight years of a Liberal government and increasing government spending by $176 billion. To go back to my own house, if my budget had gone up by 63% and my spouse and children looked around and everything was more expensive, they might be asking me what is going on. They might ask what all this spending was for. That is the incredible thing about it. Right now, we are in the middle of a massive public service strike. The Liberals massively increased the size of the government over the past eight years, as well as spending on the government, and still somehow managed to have 100,000 public servants go on strike. We are now on day nine. This is stunning incompetence. Everything is more expensive. People cannot buy a house, and they can barely pay their rent. Government workers have walked off the job. That is the Liberals' record. It is astounding. When we look at all this, it has been financed with deficit spending, which adds to the debt. The debt is now $1.2 trillion. Interest payments on the debt have also almost doubled to $44 billion a year, soon to be $50 billion a year. Many Canadians, from coast to coast to coast, find it hard to get medical appointments or specialist appointments. We can imagine for a second what $50 billion per year would do for health care. It would help to remove the lineups that Canadians are stuck in. When so many Canadians do not have access to a family doctor, it would help to hire more family doctors. Again, this is Liberal Canada after eight years. The Liberals may not believe me; I find that often happens in this place. They seem to say they were spending all this money and ask why the Conservatives are talking about the problem. I will tell members why. It is because I get emails from people like Kim. Kim sent me an email that says, "I am stretched so thin. I either pay bills or buy food because I can't afford both." Again, we should let that sink in. There is $176 billion more spent per year by the government, and Kim is choosing whether to eat or pay bills. It is a disgrace what the government has done to this country and what it is putting Canadians through. Canadians deserve so much better than what the government has done. Kim goes on to say, "Food costs are ridiculous. Gas and heating keep going up. Is life better under this government? Not by a long shot." Can we guess what the government's answer to the affordability crisis is? It is that the carbon tax is going up. The carbon tax makes everything more expensive because the farmer who pays the carbon tax on the fuel to run the farm passes that cost on to consumers. Then the truck that takes the product from the farm to be processed has a carbon tax. That is more expensive. The plant that does the processing has a carbon tax. That makes it more expensive. It then gets trucked to a grocery store, and there is a carbon tax. It makes it more expensive. The grocery store has a heating bill with a carbon tax. That makes it more expensive. If we wonder why Canadians cannot afford to eat, it is because the government just increases the carbon tax at every opportunity. I visited a farm two weeks ago in my riding. Guess what its carbon tax bill was? It was $17,000. The Liberals say the carbon tax is revenue-neutral, but it is not. The PBO has made clear that the carbon tax is making the lives of Canadians less and less affordable all the time. I want to finish with an email from Daina. I got it just the other day. They said, "I want to express concerns for two full-time, very hard-working adults, one of which is a small business owner and in our home, so the home tax rebate doesn't assist us. We can't afford to bring a child into this world because of the costs." This is from a young couple that somehow managed to buy a home. It says she bought it five years ago, so things were not as bad then. They are choosing not to have children because they are barely making ends meet. I know what the member is going to jump up and say, "What about $10-a-day day care?" They know about it, and they are still making this choice. For one thing, it is just not available for everybody. Not everybody gets it. The government spends $176 billion more per year, and everything is worse in this country. People are going to food banks. People are choosing between heating their homes and eating. People are choosing not to have children. That is the Liberals' legacy, and it is disgraceful.