Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join the debate on the opposition motion, which calls for the government to table “a fiscally responsible budget before the House adjourns for the summer, that reverses [the] inflationary policies” of the past nine and a half years under the Liberal government.

Let us be clear about a few things. The government most assuredly is not a new government. There has not been a change of government; it is a continuation of the existing government. There is a new Prime Minister; that is true, but there is not a new government, nor is his presence new. The Prime Minister spent the last five years as an adviser to the last prime minister.

Anyone attending question period can see for themself that the front bench in the current Parliament is a lot like the front bench in the last Parliament. The new Minister of Transport is the former deputy prime minister and finance minister, as well as the former global affairs minister and trade minister. The new finance minister is the former industry minister, as well as the former global affairs minister and infrastructure minister. The new President of the King's Privy Council was the president of the King's privy council in the last government, and so on along the front benches.

Therefore the government is absolutely the same Liberal government that we have endured for the last nine and a half years. The same crew of ministers and advisers that has provided over nine and a half years of economic and fiscal vandalism is still in charge. In the timeless words of Pete Townshend and sung by Roger Daltrey:

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss.

The government, with a bunch of the same ministers, came into power in 2015. It inherited a balanced budget and what the New York Times in 2015 called Canada's middle class: the wealthiest middle class in the world. I know that the Liberals would appreciate that as a newspaper of record.

The Liberals were elected on a promise to run modest deficits to fund “unprecedented investments in infrastructure” that would lead to the budget's balancing itself in 2019. None of that happened. The Liberals immediately plunged Canada into structural deficits without building any of the productivity-enhancing infrastructure they had promised, and they presided over a decade of zero per capita economic growth.

Every single year, they piled on more and more debt while claiming to be bound by various fiscal metrics, always moving their own goal posts. Fiscal anchors and guardrails were declared and immediately discarded. Their 2015 election promise to balance the budget was completely forgotten. By early 2020, some $90 billion had already been added to the national debt before anybody had even heard of COVID-19. In early 2020, the country was on the brink of recession, and the Liberals were about to blow through all their budgetary projections and table a $60-billion deficit. What followed in the years since was that another $400 billion was added in deficit spending, the majority of which had nothing to do with pandemic relief.

Here we are today. After nine and a half years of uninterrupted inflationary spending, borrowing and money printing; after nine and a half years of the Liberal government's consistently exceeding every previously announced spending limit; and after nine and a half years of bloat, waste, insider dealing, sweetheart contracting, self-enrichment and smug, sanctimonious self-congratulations, we are in the midst of a full-blown affordability crisis of the government's own making and with no plan to get out.

Right now, millions of Canadians are thinking very seriously about how they are going to feed their family in the upcoming week. For some, that might mean substituting chicken for beef. For others, that may be going without fresh meat and substituting something they can find in the discounted “previously frozen” section. Many families will go without meat, fresh fruit or fresh vegetables, and are wondering how many boxes of mac and cheese it will take to get them through the week or how they are going to put nutritious meals together for their kids' lunches. Many Canadians are increasingly unable to pay for food at all and are turning to food banks, which have seen record use across Canada under the government.

Not helping things at all is a housing crisis, which has also emerged during the government's nine and a half years. Average rent and mortgage costs have more than doubled since the government was elected in 2015. That is why we are debating the motion. We are in a food inflation crisis long in the making. All the elements of the food inflation crisis, which is exacerbated by a housing affordability crisis, were here long before the trade war, but now there is even greater urgency. Last week's food inflation numbers are horrific: The cost of beef sirloin is up 34%, oranges are up 26%, white rice is up 14%, infant formula is up 9%, and the list goes on. Canadian families will spend an average of nearly $17,000 on groceries this year.

We know that taxes, government spending, deficits and printing money all contribute to inflation; the government has admitted as much. We also know that the government once again claimed suddenly, during the most recent election, that it will do something to rein in its out-of-control spending, and we know that many Canadians appear to have believed the Prime Minister when he claimed to be different from the last prime minister and the other ministers who surrounded him in the last Parliament and said he was going to control spending.

The Prime Minister brandished his resume and boasted about his experience as a crisis manager, so where is the plan to deal with the crisis and bring down inflation, reduce food prices, increase housing supply and increase the productivity of the Canadian economy so Canadians who work hard can regain their place as the world's wealthiest middle class? It is nowhere; there is no plan to be found, because the Prime Minister refuses to table one.

The Prime Minister tabled an estimates bill, which appears to double down on all the failed policies and strategies of the past nine and a half years, but the government will not table a budget. In the absence of a budget, all we can do is judge the government by the estimates it has tabled, and the judgment is a terrible indictment of the new Prime Minister and the tired old government.

The estimates show that the government is on track to be even worse than before. The estimates show an overall spending increase of 8% at a time when the Liberals promised to restore fiscal discipline. It is an 8% increase in spending without concrete solutions for any of Canada's major problems. It is not fiscal discipline; it is just bloat. The massive 34% increase in the use of third party consultants is proof of both a refusal to deal with out-of-control spending and a clearly broken campaign promise.

I know there are some people in the press gallery or elsewhere who will say and have said that, no, the estimates are not comparable to last year, we cannot compare the main estimates from last year to this year, we have to wait until the supplementary estimates are tabled later in the year, and these are just the mains and not the government's full spending plan for the year. They ask whether we know the difference between the estimates and a budget. To those people, I say, yes, we do know the difference. The estimates are the money that the government will actually be authorized to spend. They are not a budget. That is exactly the point: There is no budget.

The Liberals campaigned on the Prime Minister's being a safe pair of hands in a crisis and the “man with the plan”, and on just enough change that we might forget about how incompetent and unserious the previous government was for nine and a half years. Now it turns out that there is no plan at all, just a bunch of new spending that will have to be funded by taxes and borrowing, paid for by people who are literally struggling to put food on the table.

Parliament was adjourned, prorogued and then dissolved, since mid-December, so for nearly six months, Parliament sat idle. The last sort of mini budget was delivered by nobody. There was literally no name on the fall economic statement. No minister was attached to it during Justin Trudeau's last-ditch attempt to remain in power.

Six months later, Canadians are entitled to a detailed plan and at least some degree of honesty and transparency about how the government will tax, spend and borrow; how much the deficit will be; and whether there is any plan, even another phony plan, to eventually balance the budget. This is the absolute minimum owed by the government to Canadians. It was demanded by the people represented in the House last week, so let me add my voice to those calling on the government to table a budget before the summer. Canadians will not get fooled again.

Pat Kelly

$522,584.00