Mr. Speaker, if I were to describe an entity that changes its fiscal reporting midway through the year, alters the financial metrics by which it judges itself, repeatedly misses every fiscal anchor it sets, racks up unsustainable debt and refuses to provide transparent answers to basic financial questions, one might assume that I was describing a corporation on the brink of collapse. However, those are the defining characteristics of the government. This would never be acceptable in the private sector, and it should have no place in our government.
Year after year, the national debt keeps climbing. Interest payments now exceed what we transfer to provinces for health care. The deficit, once promised by the Liberal government to be modest and temporary, has now doubled. Instead of restoring discipline, the government is rewriting the rules and stretching the definition of capital investment so far that even subsidies, tax breaks and housing incentives are being rebranded as capital formation. What a joke. These are accounting tricks, a deliberate attempt to make the books look better than they are. More blatantly, the government knows it has lost control of Canada’s finances and is now redefining capital investment as a communications strategy to confuse Canadians.
The independent Parliamentary Budget Officer described this change as “overly expansive and exceeds international practice such as that adopted by the United Kingdom.” When a government starts changing definitions to hide the scale of its recklessness, it erodes the trust that underpins every dollar of public spending.
Canadians deserve honesty and transparency. They deserve a government that manages the nation's finances, not manipulates them. While the Liberals manipulate the way they will present the budget, the deficit is set to balloon to $68.5 billion. This debt will be carried by my generation and by my children’s generation. It is generational debt. It is generational betrayal. A mortgage placed on the future of our children is a failure of duty.
Let us stop pretending the numbers do not matter. We cannot spend our way to affordability. We cannot manipulate the books and pretend our performance has improved. We cannot betray future generations by burying them beneath mountains of debt and calling it investment.
For 10 years, the Liberals promised that deficit spending would fuel growth. However, after a decade of their investment, investment per worker has fallen by 10.8%. Their deficits have fuelled inflation, driven up interest rates and left Canada with the worst economic growth per capita in the G7. Now the Prime Minister is continuing with the same mistakes and producing the same failures.
The Prime Minister likes to talk about the private sector. Let us be clear. It is the private sector that is condemning his ideology, not with words but with actions: 86,000 job losses, the second-highest unemployment rate in the G7 and $54 billion of investment fleeing this country. It is saying no to reckless spending. It is saying no to a lack of transparency. It is saying no to excessive regulation and a government that is obsessed with punishing success.
Capital is leaving because confidence in the Prime Minister has left. Businesses will not invest in a government that punishes success and calls it fairness. Businesses will not invest when projects can be held in regulatory purgatory. They will not build under a government that spends without restraint and calls it compassion. The job losses, unemployment, food bank use and investment withdrawal numbers are not Conservative numbers, Liberal numbers, NDP numbers or Bloc numbers. They are reality, and reality has a way of catching up.
They tell us that a young couple in Aurora, Ontario, working five jobs between them, still cannot afford to start a family. They tell us that small business owners, once the backbone of our economy, are shutting their doors because they simply cannot keep up. They tell us that a generation is losing faith, not in their abilities but in their government and in their future.
I would like the share a special message I received last night from a young woman. She said she tried to do everything right: get married, have a family, go to school and get a career. Her husband makes six figures, and once upon a time, that was a dream. They are now unable to afford the house they desperately need for their young family. She said she knows life gives us curveballs, but she did not think her own government would be her undoing.
Every dollar that leaves this country means lower wages and fewer jobs for Canadian workers. Every dollar the government spends comes straight from the pockets of those same workers, with families already stretched to the limit. Let us be honest: A government that cannot live within its means will never make life affordable for those who must live within theirs.
This week, Canadians watched as the Prime Minister visited President Trump and promised $1 trillion of investment flowing from Canada to the U.S. We in Canada need a counterweight to bring investment to Canada, and the Prime Minister's lack of action has failed to deliver.
Canada needs decisive leadership now. We need our natural resource sector opened; our housing sector unleashed from taxes, excessive development charges and permit delays; our domestic capital reinvested here at home, not in the U.S.; and a Canada where investors see stability, opportunity and transparency.
Canada can be strong. We can restore discipline. We can restore trust. We can restore the promise of this beautiful country, but only if we have the courage to face the truth. Instead, we have a Prime Minister focused on manipulating the budget to hide the extent of his reckless spending from Canadians.
It is time to stop the illusion that Ottawa can spend its way to prosperity. It is past time to bring truth, discipline and integrity back to our public finances. It is what our children and their children deserve from us.