The Budget
Date: 2023_04_18
Chamber: HOUSE OF COMMONS
Mr. Michael Kram: I am very pleased to have the opportunity to participate in the budget debate this morning. It has been eight years since the Liberal government has been in office, which is ample time for people to step back and take things into perspective. Imagine for a minute a typical Canadian family that is driving an eight-year-old car. Let us say they decide it is time to buy a new car, so they head down to the local car dealership to walk through the showroom and maybe take a car for a test drive. What are some of the new features they would notice in a 2023 car that were not there in 2015? For starters, the entertainment system has improved by leaps and bounds, with features like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. It has never been easier to parallel park or fit into tight spots, with rear-view cameras, dash cameras and even 360deg bird's-eye view cameras. Gas-powered cars have never been more fuel-efficient, and more options for electric or hybrid vehicles are showing up in showrooms every year. Safety features have improved immensely as well, with motion sensors to tell us if another car is in our blind spot or if we are following the car in front too closely. With all these improvements in cars that we have seen over the last eight years, I cannot help but wonder if we have also seen any similar improvements in the federal government. What does the federal government do today that makes the average Canadian pause and say that it is a big improvement from eight years ago? Let us look at the passport office. I remember that just a few years ago, when I had to renew my passport, I was in and out of the passport office in maybe half an hour; my passport arrived in the mail in a couple of weeks. However, over the past year, the passport office has been a national embarrassment. People have been camping out in front of passport offices for days, only to be turned away because their travel plans have not yet been finalized. To this day, my constituency office still gets phone calls and emails from people asking for advice about how to apply for a passport so they do not have to cancel their vacation plans or camp out in front of a passport office for days on end. Let us look at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the IRCC. If someone wants to sponsor a friend or family member to come to Canada and that person needs a visitor's visa or a permanent residency card, it used to be a relatively simple process of filling out and rubber-stamping a few forms. Now it takes many months or even years of waiting. Literally every day, my constituency office receives multiple phone calls and emails asking what the problem is with the IRCC, why their cases are past their processing times, why it will not return their calls and when their loved ones will be allowed to come to Canada. What about inflation and the cost of living? It used to be that anyone with a full-time job could at least put food on the table without having to turn to the local food bank for help, but that is not the case in Canada anymore. With the carbon tax pushing the price of groceries higher, more fully employed working families are turning to food banks for help. In my home province of Saskatchewan, food bank use was up 35% last year. How about openness and transparency? The current Prime Minister once tweeted, "It's hard not to feel disappointed in your government when every day there is a new scandal." Today, the current government has been found in violation of Ethics Commissioner rules on five separate occasions and counting. However, that will probably slow down a bit now that the sister-in-law of a Liberal cabinet minister has been appointed as the new Ethics Commissioner. Has the government at least made our streets safer? Are dangerous criminals being kept behind bars, or are tougher penalties deterring these criminals? Sadly, the answer is no. Year after year since the Liberal government was elected, violent crime rates have gotten worse than the year before. It is no longer uncommon to hear of a fatal stabbing on public transit or in front of a downtown Starbucks in broad daylight. To continue our car shopping analogy, by any objective measure, the government has been a major downgrade compared to what Canadians had just eight years ago. Unlike that Canadian family that is shopping for a new car and checking out all of the new whistles and bells that did not exist eight years ago, Canadians are left wondering why the Liberal government cannot perform the basic functions that governments should. How is it that Canadians traded in a safe, reliable, dependable vehicle for a lemon that is always breaking down? I think it is fair to ask this: If we are consistently getting so much less from the government, then are we at least getting what we paid for? Is the deterioration in government services the result of massive spending cuts and massive tax cuts? If one takes a closer look at the numbers, that is not the case at all. Indeed, the Liberal government continues to implement higher and higher taxes. The carbon tax was raised yet again to $65 per tonne and will continue to increase up to $130 a tonne by the end of the decade. The excise tax on beer, wine and spirits was raised again by 2%. If that were not enough, in the budget, the government has also decided to implement a global minimum corporate tax, a share buyback tax and a tax on dividends held by financial institutions. Therefore, the government is not getting taxes under control; in addition, it is not getting spending under control. Total expenditures for this budget would be just under $500 billion. That compares to a budget of just under $300 billion only eight years ago. This means that annual spending by the federal government has increased by nearly two-thirds over the past eight years. When one looks at the details of where exactly these expenditure increases are coming from, the picture becomes much more troubling. This year, $44 billion, or almost 10% of the government spending, will go towards interest payments on the federal debt. In the past, the Liberals have said that the government's massive debt burden was nothing to worry about because of record-low interest rates. Sadly, the days of record-low interest rates are over, and Canadians are left paying the bill. What is also troubling is the ever-growing size of the federal civil service. During the last term of Stephen Harper's government, with a consistent focus on efficiency, the size of the civil service was gradually reduced by 25,000 employees. Since coming to power eight years ago, the Liberal government has hired back more than triple that number. Perhaps if the government were not so obsessed with regulating social media newsfeed algorithms, confiscating hunting rifles and shotguns from law-abiding firearms owners, restricting fertilizer use by farmers or sending COVID cheques to dead people, we would not need this small army of federal civil servants. While these times may be difficult, it is important to stay optimistic. For the 1.5 million Canadians who had to use the food bank last year, the thousands of Canadians whose vacations were ruined because they could not get their passports renewed and the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who are trying to sponsor a loved one to come to Canada, I would say that they should not lose hope. This latest Liberal budget shows that it is time to trade in this old, broken-down, rusted-out clunker lemon of a Liberal government for a shiny, new, reliable, dependable Conservative government that people could depend on.