Mr. Speaker, it is October 1, 2025. The government's fiscal year is April 1 to March 31 every year. We are now seven months behind in having a budget presented to this House of Commons on how the government is going to choose what it is spending money on this year.
Budgets are important documents. I was in a synagogue in Calgary some time ago, and the rabbi and I had a discussion about the importance of budgets in religious organizations and also in governments. They are important documents because they represent choices. They represent priorities and they represent respect for other people's money.
This budget is not showing any of those. There has been no priority listed for seven months now into this fiscal year. Nobody knows what the government's priorities and choices are going to be.
Furthermore, this shows a complete disregard for other people's money. That is the money of the taxpayers of Canada, who are not getting a view of where the government is going to spend the money that they trust it with to run the services that are provided to Canadians. That is a problem. If the public does not have its eyes on exactly what the government is doing and exactly how it is going to measure its performance, then we are missing one of the key attributes of a democratic society that has an accountable and responsible government.
One of the roles of the House of Commons is to approve not just the budget but the actual spending that goes out. It is called the estimates process. This past year, the House was prorogued for much of the year. In the last year, we sat in this House as a Parliament for less than five months. That is a diminution of the role that democracy plays in Canada. The House was prorogued for almost four months.
We had an election. In the meantime, billions of dollars were issued through what we call government awards. They were not approved by Parliament. There was no vetting of what was going on here. There was just money going out the door through the last fiscal year and into this fiscal year.
Now we are into a budget process in which we are effectively seven months behind. This is as a result of complete incompetence and a disregard for the tools of democracy that are time-tested in Canada about what we are supposed to do, how we are supposed to perform and how we are supposed to report that to Canadians.
There is a consequence to this. One of the main problems with running budget deficits is it creates inflation, particularly when the budget deficits are financed by a central bank that is printing money. That causes inflation. There is no question about that. The thing about inflation, to define what it is for people, is that it reduces their buying power for what they can purchase in society. That is the problem. It means that our rent or food costs more in real dollars. It is a tax. It means less disposable income for Canadians. It means they have to play catch-up every year. The government can inflate the dollars it is collecting and try to debase the dollars it is actually spending.
However, it is about choices at the end of the day. This year, what is the deficit going to be? We do not know. It was going to be $50 billion, then $60 billion. In the spring, I thought it would be $80 billion. Then the C. D. Howe Institute came out and said it was going to be $92 billion, yet the government continues its spending.
The solution, according to the Prime Minister, is to restate the way we report this budget.
This is not a solution. We have to get back to balanced budgets.
