Parliamentary Speeches

Madam Speaker, the government first got rid of balanced budgets and is now getting rid of budgets altogether. We have not had one in two years. However, this economic statement proposes to raise the debt limit to $1.8 trillion. That is $1 trillion higher than the debt was only a year ago. The combined debt of all governments is now bigger than the entire GDP for the first time in recorded history. If we add up business, household and government debt, we have a debt-to-GDP ratio of 387%, which is the highest on record. It is twice the historic average, bigger than that of the U.S. during the subprime crisis and bigger than that of Greece during the debt crisis. It is bigger than 41 of the 45 biggest debt crises in the last century. Does the hon. member believe that if the government and this country fail to reduce the debt ratio before interest rates return to normal, we will have a massive debt crisis on our hands here in Canada?

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has failed on several counts. He has the highest unemployment rate in the G7. That is a failure. He has the largest deficit in the G7. That is another failure. He has the lowest vaccination rate in the G7. That is another failure. When the Montreal Canadiens had a string of losses, they fired their coach. When the country's coach has a string of failures, is it not time to fire him?

Mr. Speaker, the problem with that is that, on 49 different occasions in the House, the Prime Minister has said that the best measurement of jobs is the unemployment rate. By that measure, Japan has a 3% unemployment rate, Germany and the U.K. have 5% unemployment rates, the U.S. has 6% and Italy and France, two socialist countries, have 9% unemployment rates. Canada is at the top of the heap for job losses and unemployment. Why does the Prime Minister excel at being the worst? Is it because he has so much practice?

Mr. Speaker, a year after the great financial crisis began, Canada had lower unemployment than the United States of America. That was under a previous Conservative government. Today, the Prime Minister has the humiliating job of meeting with the U.S. President while Canada's unemployment is a third higher than in the United States and higher than in Germany, Japan, the U.K. and all of the G7 countries combined. What are the 800,000 Canadians without paycheques going to do to pay the bills, while they watch workers around the world get back to their jobs?

Mr. Speaker, under any objective measure, we had lower unemployment than the Americans did during the Harper era and we have a third higher unemployment right now. This is if we line up the measurements of unemployment, apples to apples, between the two countries. There are 800,000 Canadians who have lost their jobs and not regained them and our unemployment is significantly higher than that of the Americans, which means either we have not recovered as many jobs or we went in with a much higher jobless rate to begin with. Either way, the parliamentary secretary should stop making excuses and tell these Canadians when they will get their paycheques back.

Mr. Speaker, to be the worst at one thing is a real distinction. To be the worst at everything takes real talent and effort. Unemployment in Canada, with 800,000 people losing their jobs, is the highest in the G7: the worst. Our vaccine results here in Canada are the worst in the G7, and the Liberals have paid for all of that failure with the biggest deficit, the worst fiscal record in the G7. Can the Prime Minister explain to us how he has managed to deliver the worst results at the highest price?

Mr. Speaker, I will quote what the BMO says about the Canada's-U.S. comparison: “the unemployment rate in Canada was 3.1 percentage points higher than the U.S. [in January]—this compares with a 2 ppt spread over the past five years....we estimate that Canadian employment could be roughly 300,000 jobs below where it would otherwise be if GDP was keeping pace with the U.S. economy.” The member should stop torturing the data to make it confess to anything, and tell the truth. Does Canada not have the highest unemployment in the G7 today, yes or no?

Madam Speaker, as the new U.K. variant starts to spread, Canadians were looking for some reassurance today from the chief public health officer, but this is what she said: “For the next months we’re not going to have a lot of people vaccinated, that’s a fact.” She is right. We are now ranked 52nd, and 51 countries in the world are vaccinating quicker than us, many countries at six, seven and even 20 times our rate. What is the Prime Minister's plan now? Is he just going to lock us down forever?

Madam Speaker, the purchase of vaccines is the most important procurement since the government bought arms in the Second World War. Thousands of lives and tens of thousands of jobs depend on it. When the Prime Minister thought about who he should buy them from, he looked around the world and said, “I know: the country that is holding our people hostage.” Members can imagine the PRC politburo filled with bureaucrats rolling around on the ground in gut-splitting laughter at the Prime Minister's naivety. I have a simple question. When he wasted 100 days in the PRC, what the hell was he thinking?

Madam Speaker, today we are debating a motion that seeks “consumer-friendly environment grading label on all products available to Canadian consumers” I could not agree more with the goal of this environmental labelling proposition. Therefore, today, I am going to take it one step further and help write some of the warning labels that might actually be used if this proposal is implemented. Let me start with a product that is our number one export in Canada, and I speak of course of petroleum. It is also an import. Because we do not have pipelines to get our oil to ourselves, we import almost a million barrels a day from abroad. My idea is that we not just have a label but actually a loud speaker that could tell people where the oil that made the gasoline that they are pumping into their cars actually came from and what the money was used for. This is how I see it. People are pumping gas into their automobiles and a voice comes over a loud speaker, “Dear valued customer, because the government blocked the energy east pipeline, which would have taken a million barrels of western oil to eastern refineries, Canada imports almost a million barrels a day.” The voice goes on and it might say that the gasoline they are putting in their car comes from the 100,000 barrels of oil Canada imports from Saudi Arabia every day, that their gas is going to, in the words of Amnesty International: The authorities escalated repression of the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly. They harassed, arbitrarily detained and prosecuted dozens of government critics, human rights defenders, including women’s rights activists, members of the Shi’a minority and family members of activists. Saudi Arabia failed to co-operate with an inquiry by the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions into the murder. The inquiry concluded in June that Jamal Khashoggi was the victim of a deliberate, premeditated extrajudicial killing for which Saudi Arabia was responsible. Then it says that their payment today will fund the surveillance equipment, prisons, whips, execution chambers or other resources that make state torture and assassinations possible. Finally, it thanks them very much for filling up with them today. That could be one of the notices that we could have when Canadians are using oil from abroad. Oil is not just fuel; it is also used in things like smart phones and eyeglasses, but let us stick with smart phones. Perhaps when Canadians are buying one, they could have this label written on the phone, and it quotes directly from BBC. The BBC is of course talking about Nigeria, from which we import 12,000 barrels of oil every single day and countless other barrels embedded in the products that we buy. It would say: Continued oil spills from the activities of multinationals have also cast doubt on the impact of the clean-up exercise. 'Things are getting worse by the day,' Celestine Akpobari, an environmental activist from Ogoni, told the BBC. Mr Akpobari says people can no longer fish or farm because of the devastation. 'People are dying, there are strange diseases and women are having miscarriages' from the pollution, he says. UN scientists have found an eight-centimetre layer of refined oil floating on top of the water that supplies the communities' drinking water, vastly higher than is legally permitted. The notice could thank them very much for buying this smart phone which includes Nigerian oil, that they were funding this devastating pollution abroad, that unfortunately the oil in the smart phone was not from Canada, where none of the aforementioned practices are undertaken, and enjoy their product. That is another thing we could put on our product labelling if we were so intent on passing this proposal. I am happy to write labels all day for all kinds of products, because we forget that oil is used for everything from textiles, basketballs, combs, prosthetics and countless other products that we do not even realize contain petroleum. Perhaps it is time to have warning labels about all the dirty foreign oil that goes into those products, because the clean, green, environmentally, ethically and economically responsible oil produced in Canada cannot actually make it to the markets. Before our friends stand up and say we will not need oil anymore because we are all going to go electric, there will have to be, of course, a warning label for that. It is going to be on electric cars when we pass this motion. Forgive me if I quote the CBC: Lithium mining, needed to build the lithium ion batteries at the heart of today's EVs, has also been connected to other kinds of environmental harm. There have been mass fish kills related to lithium mining in Tibet, for example. The freshwater supply is being consumed by mines in South America's lithium-rich region. Even in North America, where mining regulations are strict, harsh chemicals are used to extract the valuable metal. I will quote Wired magazine: In May 2016, hundreds of protesters threw dead fish onto the streets of Tagong, a town on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. They had plucked them from the waters of the Liqi river, where a toxic chemical leak from the Ganzizhou Rongda Lithium mine had wreaked havoc with the local ecosystem. There are pictures of masses of dead fish on the surface of the stream. Some eyewitnesses reported seeing cow and yak carcasses floating downstream, dead from drinking contaminated water. By buying an environmentally friendly electric car, people will be sending money back to mines just like the one described in this warning label, and they will be thanked very much for buying the automobile. By the way, dear customer, none of these kinds of practices are carried out by Canada's clean, green energy sector, which, in contrast to the aforementioned foreign suppliers, actually has the support of its surrounding communities. There is a different kind of warning label we could put on our products. We could actually highlight the successes of Canadian energy, by contrast. For example, we could talk about the countless reserves and other indigenous communities that have signed benefits agreements to receive billions of dollars of revenue from our energy sector, lifting countless first nations people out of poverty. Twenty out of 20 of the first nations communities that surrounded the proposed Teck Frontier mine supported it. Every single community along the path of the Coastal GasLink project supported it. We could tell people in a warning label that if they buy products that use Canadian energy, they will be helping to fight poverty in first nations communities. They would also be buying oil with GHG emissions that are lower than the average per barrel produced. In fact, in the last 20 years, dear customer, those who have filled up their cars with gasoline originating in western Canada's energy sector have put in their vehicles an energy source that resulted from a 36% reduction in GHG emissions per barrel of oil in the last two decades. By the way, dear customer, those who buy this or that product containing Canadian oil are supporting the industry that paid over $600 billion in taxes to all three levels of government to fund schools, hospitals and roads. They will also be putting money into an industry that faces the highest and most intense regulations on the environment, on labour and on human rights. These are all things we could find a way to put in a label on the products that emanate from Canada's energy sector. I encourage us to continue this dialogue. As Conservatives, we are prepared to come forward to help in the drafting of these labels that are now going to go on our products, so that Canadians can distinguish between the dirty, unethical, polluting and oppressive sources of energy from around the world and the clean, green, world-leading sources of energy around the world. We might even tell Canadians on these warning labels that the first carbon-negative oil company, Whitecap Resources, which puts more GHGs back in the ground than it does in the air and actually takes greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, is a Canadian company. Maybe that could go on one of the labels we are going to produce as a result of today's proposal.

Mr. Speaker, today, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business published a report showing that one in six small businesses are considering closing permanently, putting 20% of private-sector jobs in jeopardy. We have already lost more than 800,000 jobs and the unemployment rate is one-third higher than the G7 average. The government promised one million jobs. When will these workers get their paycheque?

Mr. Speaker, they need to update their talking points over there, instead of just reading a selective quote from some starchy report. The reality is this. Here are the numbers. Across the G7, the unemployment rate averages 6%. In the U.S., it is 6.3%; in the EU, it is 7.5%; in Canada, it is 9.4%. We are far worse than all the other countries that are also facing the COVID crisis. Is it not clear that while those economies are suffering under COVID, our economy has the added problem of suffering under the policies of the government?

Mr. Speaker, that answer demonstrates how out of touch the government is. If the policies were working, we would not have 834,100 more Canadians out of work now than were a year ago. If it were working, then we would not have an unemployment rate that is 50% higher than the average of the G7 and of the United States of America. The reality is that the government is delivering among the worst job records on Planet Earth, and Canadians are starting to wonder how they are going to put food on the table or a roof overhead. When will those people who have lost their jobs get their paycheques back?

Mr. Speaker, 834,100 is the number of paycheques that are missing in Canada. It is the number of families sitting teary-eyed around the kitchen table trying to figure out how they are going to fund their future. While the Deputy Prime Minister is congratulating the Conservatives for supporting income programs for those same families, those families need jobs back in order to secure their future. With our unemployment a third higher than the G7 average, when will those families have their paycheques back?

Mr. Speaker, what the Prime Minister has just said is false. In fact, his Deputy Prime Minister thanked the Conservatives for supporting that assistance. It just shows how out of touch he is that he thinks families can go on living forever off a measly $2,000 cheque from the government. They do not have multi-million dollar trust funds like he does. They want jobs like workers in other countries, where unemployment is significantly lower than it is here. Why is it that workers abroad get paycheques while ours here at home just get credit card debts?

Mr. Speaker, what the IMF actually did is cut Canada's growth projection for this year by a third, not to mention that we are falling behind the rest of the world on jobs. In fact, the G7 average is 6%; the U.S., 6.3%; the EU, 7.5%; and Canada, 9.4%. They also have COVID, but they are getting their jobs back. Is it not clear that for Canadians to regain their jobs, the Prime Minister will have to lose his?

Madam Speaker, we are not talking about statistics today. We are talking about a human tragedy for the 213,000 families who have lost their paycheques. That is the number of jobs that have been lost in Canada. Meanwhile, 50,000 new jobs have been created in the United States. Our unemployment rate is higher than that of the G7, the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom and the average for all advanced economies. Why are foreign workers earning paycheques—

Madam Speaker, the member is right; it is a global pandemic. It exists in the United States, which has significantly lower unemployment and added 50,000 jobs last month. It exists in the U.K., in Japan, in Germany, across the G7. It exists across the advanced economies, but every single jurisdiction I just named has lower unemployment than Canada. We have now lost 213,000 jobs in just one month while the rest of the world is returning to work. Why do foreign workers get paycheques and we get credit card debts?

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's plan to phase out the energy sector and move away from manufacturing is looking worse than ever. These naturally physically distanced goods-producing sectors would have thrived even throughout the pandemic, but now, as a result of their absence, we have higher unemployment here in Canada than the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Japan, the G7 average, and the European Union have, even though all of those jurisdictions are struggling with COVID as well. Why is it that workers abroad get paycheques while Canadians just get credit card debts?

Mr. Speaker, I hate to break it to the Prime Minister, but Canadians' credit card debts are monstrous. Under the current Prime Minister, household debt, for the first time ever, has exceeded the size of our entire GDP. His own top economic adviser said that his plan would add a trillion dollars without improving our economy at all. The Prime Minister has among the highest unemployment in the G7 and among the lowest vaccination rates, and at the highest cost. Why is it that the Prime Minister can only judge his success by how much he adds to household and national credit card debts, rather than how many paycheques he can create?

Mr. Speaker, when the Prime Minister took office, he told us that deficit financing would boost growth, but in three of the four years that followed, per capita GDP growth has been zero, and that was before COVID. In fact, the last five years of per capita GDP growth have been the worst since the Great Depression. The government went ahead and asked for $700 billion more of borrowing authorizations, and since then, the IMF has downgraded growth projections for Canada by a third, below the U.S., the eurozone and the average of the advanced economies. When will the government realize that it cannot put economic growth on the national credit card?

Mr. Speaker, in addition to dragging down growth, government borrowing risks driving up inflation. According to CIBC economist Avery Shenfeld, additional government spending is being offset by the earlier need to hike interest rates to contain inflation. Higher interest rates would be a disaster for the households, businesses and governments whose combined debts are almost four times the size of our entire economy. Higher interest rates could collapse our economy. Why is the government risking our economic future on credit card debts instead of securing it with paycheques?

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak in favour of jobs, the environment and the prosperity and dignity of our indigenous people, and to speak against the wrong-headed decision of the Liberal government to ban the shipments of clean, green Canadian energy off the northwest coast of British Columbia. Before I begin addressing the specifics of this export, I would like to address some of the falsehoods that have been espoused by numerous members of the House, including the preceding member, that have been used to destroy the jobs and livelihoods of thousands of Canadians, including our indigenous people, over the last five years. Let me start with the first falsehood that has been used to justify this attack on our clean green western Canadian energy sector, that the reason our energy sector is suffering is the world is moving away from oil. That is just the way the world is going we are told. That is factually wrong. In fact, this week the IMF reported that oil prices will rise 20% this year over last. The International Energy Agency projects that oil consumption will average 100 million barrels per day, every day, for the next 20 years. That is not a reduction. The agency predicts that, even if all of the most draconian anti-energy, anti-carbon policies were put in place by all of the governments of the world, for the next two decades the globe will still consume at least 60 million barrels of oil per day. That is why the U.S. oil sector has doubled its production in the last 13 years while our sector has been in full-scale collapse. The question is not if the world will use oil; the question is how and, more importantly, whose oil? The member for Regina—Lewvan brought to the world's attention an interesting point recently. He said that the trendy anti-development hipsters who are constantly telling us they buy fair trade coffee are not concerned in the least whether or not they are consuming fair trade oil. They see no problem with Canada importing millions of barrels of oil from countries that engage in monstrous human rights violations to produce their oil. At the same time, they denigrate the production of ethical clean, green Canadian petroleum. That brings us to the next falsehood that opponents of this bill and the energy sector in Canada have espoused, which is that their policies are attempting to help the environment. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Let me first address the tanker ban this bill proposes to remove. There are some exceptions to the tanker ban in Canada that the Liberal government put in, with the support of the NDP and the Green Party. Those exceptions include that petroleum products can be shipped in northern British Columbia waters. Liquefied natural gas, gasoline and jet fuel can pass through those waters. Of course, all of those fuels are foreign-produced fuels. The ban only applies to ethically produced Canadian oil being shipped out of Canada, but not unethical and environmentally degrading foreign oil being shipped off the coast. The ban has nothing to do with protecting the coast from shipping, as it allows shipping; it just does not allow the shipping of Canadian products. When the Liberals brought in their bill, they only banned Canadian energy from being shipped off the northwestern coast, not the passage of foreign energy through our waters. Obviously, it has nothing to do with protecting the waters or protecting against spills, but has everything to do with shutting in Canadian energy production. Finally, on this point about the environment, we have the most environmentally friendly oil sector in the world. In fact, if we were to displace a world barrel of oil with an Alberta or Saskatchewan barrel of oil, we would reduce global emissions, because our emissions per barrel are lower than the global average. In fact, some Canadian oil companies are not only proposing to go carbon neutral, but there is also one, Whitecap Resources, a Calgary-based oil company, that is the world's first carbon-negative company. It presently takes more carbon out of the atmosphere than it puts into it. It has found a way to do this by storing carbon beneath the earth, from where it originally came. This is perhaps one of the most promising emission-reduction technologies on earth. In fact, Elon Musk announced just in the last two weeks that he would pay $100 million to the best carbon capture and storage initiative that a company can invent. I hope that Mr. Musk, whom I am sure is listening to this speech, takes a careful look at Whitecap Resources and gives $100 million to that company to create more jobs taking carbon out of the atmosphere. The next falsehood that opponents of Canadian energy spread is that they are doing this for indigenous people. That is a total and absolute falsehood. In fact, when the Liberal government, under the current Prime Minister, cancelled the Northern Gateway pipeline, which would have shipped western oil to the Pacific and onward to Asia, a statement in response was issued by 31 first nations and Métis communities: We are profoundly shocked and disappointed by the news that the Federal Government has no intention of pursuing any further consultation and dialogue with our communities on the important issue of the Northern Gateway Project. We are also deeply disappointed that a Prime Minister who campaigned on a promise of reconciliation with Indigenous communities would now blatantly choose to deny our 31 First Nations and Métis communities of our constitutionally protected right to economic development. We see today's announcement as clear evidence of their unwillingness to follow through on his promise.... The economic benefits from Northern Gateway to Indigenous communities are unprecedented in Canadian history. As part of the opportunity to share up to 33% ownership and control in a major Canadian energy infrastructure project, the project's Aboriginal Equity Partners [would] also receive $2 billion in long-term economic, business, and education opportunities for their communities. All of the left-wing members, the Greens, the New Democrats and the Liberals, who claim that they believe in reconciliation, had no problem vaporizing that $2-billion worth of educational, economic and business opportunities for those communities. They had no problem bulldozing over the constitutional rights of indigenous communities to be consulted before energy and resource decisions are made with respect to their lands, because these parties actually do not care about reconciliation; they care only about using first nation communities as an excuse, a false and dishonest excuse, to block energy sector development and to play to a far-left ideology that does nothing for this country. Therefore, it is another falsehood to claim that any of this is being done for the indigenous people. Next, there is a claim that this sector only matters to western Canada. Again, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Canada's number-one export is oil. It is far greater than auto parts, which is a distant second, and far greater than any other export. Since the attack on our energy sector that began in 2015, Canada has had a trade deficit in every single year. That means we are buying more from the world and are borrowing from the world to pay for it. That is a recipe to indebt and enslave ourselves to foreign lenders, who lend to us so that we can buy from them. They get the money, we get the debt, and forever after we work to pay their bills through interest payments. That is not a future. Our future should be one of energy independence, of reaching foreign markets, getting world prices and getting big powerful paycheques for Canadian workers, especially indigenous workers, to defeat poverty through powerful new job opportunities for pipe fitters, welders, engineers and others. This is the way that we secure jobs, secure our economy and secure our future.

Mr. Speaker, do you want the good news or the bad news? I will start with the good news. We all need a boost. The IMF is out with its revised projections for economic growth, and world output growth is up. Advanced economies' projected output is up. American GDP output is way up, almost double. Now for the bad news. Canada's is one-third lower than projected just back in October. That is equal to $30 billion in lost GDP and lost paycheques for Canadians. Now that Canadians will not have those paycheques, what does the government expect them to do, put it all on a credit card?

Mr. Speaker, something strange happened in October. The IMF had us growing this year at 5.2%, and now it is 3.6%. That is a massive drop, and the only thing that has happened since then is that the government has released a “fantasmic” economic statement and a Speech from the Throne full of crazy ideas to re-engineer our entire economy. Even a former Liberal adviser is out saying that the government will have spent a trillion dollars to achieve nothing for our economy. Once again, with $30 billion in lost GDP and lost paycheques along with it, what does the government expect all of those jobless people to do to pay their bills? Are they just expected to put it on the credit card?

Madam Speaker, if this pandemic has taught us anything, it is to be prepared for the unexpected, to anticipate risks before they metastasize so that we can protect ourselves and secure our future. Today, I rise in the House of Commons to draw the attention of members to a growing risk of danger to our families, our businesses and our entire country. It is the risk of the $8.6 trillion of household, corporate and government debt that is quickly accumulating on the shoulders of Canadians. This amount equals 387% of our GDP, a record ratio that is higher than the ratios in many countries that have in the past experienced devastating debt crises. Before our eyes glaze over, though, I want to remind members that a debt crisis is not just something that bankers and financial analysts talk about in the Report on Business from The Globe and Mail or on BNN. Research by reputable academic institutions shows that in the case of a financial crisis, house prices can drop by a third; stock markets, meaning people's savings, can drop by half; the economy can drop by 9%; and unemployment can rise seven percentage points. Here is the human toll of that. The University of Calgary published a study recently showing that there is a two percentage point increase in suicides for every one percentage point increase in unemployment. Imagine the human cost of 7% unemployment. More data is now showing an inextricable link between opioid abuse and unemployment. Depression and homelessness result from these types of crises. What is the nature of the risk? How serious is it? How likely are we to face it? We have to look to history. In their now-legendary book This Time is Different, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Professor Ken Rogoff wrote about what they call eight centuries of folly. They studied debt crises in 66 countries across five continents. As they write in their opening, “Each time, the experts have chimed, ‘this time is different’—claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters.” With this breakthrough study, they found definitively that experts are wrong. They lay out five standard leading indicators for a forthcoming financial crisis. I will go through them very quickly: first, falling economic output; second, a large debt buildup; third, rising household leverage; fourth, asset inflation; and fifth, large current account deficits. Do these five standard leading indicators apply to us? Let us start with the first one: falling output. Last year, in 2020, our GDP dropped 5.5%, blowing a more than $100 billion hole in our economy. That is a massive reduction in our economy, and it means that we have $100 billion less to service our debts. On the first test, from This Time is Different, we do have falling economic output. It does not matter who is to blame. It does not matter that it was COVID that caused it. What matters is the math, and the math does not lie. Let us move on to the second standard leading indicator: debt buildup. The amount of debt that a country can shoulder depends on the income that it produces to service that debt. According to the great Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith, “All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.” That underlying means of payment, of course, is GDP, so let us look at the size of our debt and how much it has grown. Since the beginning of 2015, our total debt, public and private, has gone from $6.1 trillion to $8.5 trillion, a nearly 40% increase in our debt. During that time, our GDP has only grown by 13%. In other words, our debt levels are growing almost three times as fast as our GDP, the underlying means of payment. We have now reached a level of debt to GDP of 387%, as I said earlier, but I did not tell you that it is an all-time record and nearly twice the size of the typical ratio over the last 60 years in Canada. Here is some more staggering information: The debt-to-GDP ratio of Greece when it had its massive sovereign debt crisis 10 years ago was 330%. In the United States, during the great financial crisis that came out of the mortgage bubble, their debt was 375% of GDP. In other words, our debt levels in Canada today are higher than they were in the United States and Greece when they had massive, iconic and devastating debt crises in the recent past. Therefore, we need now to pay heed as to why we think we can avoid the same thing. The only difference between them then and us now is that interest rates are low, but they will not stay that way forever. What is the composition of our debt? Where does it come from? The answer is threefold: it is government, corporate and household debt. Let us start with government debt. This year for the first time on record, Statistics Canada shows that the gross debt of all levels of government in Canada is bigger than the GDP. It just exceeded 100%, 100.3%, to be precise, in the third quarter of 2020. That has never happened before. Our debt levels are higher than they were in the 1990s when we had our own miniature near default of the federal government. That time it was 92%, so our debt levels are higher than ever before when it comes to government. Before the government rises to claim that we have the lowest debt in the G7, as a share of GDP, that is just wrong. The only reason that Finance Canada calculates it that way is that uses the assets of the CPP and the QPP to deduct from our overall net debt level without using the corresponding liabilities those funds must pay. As a result, if one were to ignore that and look at our gross debt, we have higher debt levels than both Germany and, I believe, France in the G7. That means we do not have the lowest debt levels in the G7 and cannot be worry-free and fool ourselves that our sustained buildup of government debt is not a problem. This year has seen a spectacular and never-before-seen increase in that debt. Our fiscal deficit is $381 billion. That is almost seven times bigger than the previous all-time average and equals 17% of our GDP. Let us put that into perspective. In World War I, our deficit-to-GDP ratio was 8%. In the Great Depression, it was 6%. In the great global recession it was 4%. In other words, our deficit as a share of the economy and adjusted for inflation is currently twice what it was at its peak in World War I, three times what it was at its peak in the Great Depression and four times what it was in the great global recession. Only in the Second World War was it bigger, and our ancestors, when they came back from the war, immediately began repaying that debt, running the biggest surpluses ever in 1947, and then increasing the size of our economy elevenfold in the two-and-a-half decades that followed, which allowed them to pay it off quickly. Nobody is suggesting that we will come anywhere near to those kinds of surpluses or growth rates in the post-COVID era, which means that our debt situation is arguably more ominous for the country than it was even back then. Thus, on that criterion, the second standard leading indicator of a sustained buildup of debt, Canada meets that criterion as well. We move on to household debt levels. Canada has the highest level of household debt as a ratio of disposable income in the G7. In fact, recently, our level of household debt grew to bigger than the entire Canadian economy, again setting records. These ratios mean that our households are carrying more debt than our economy can reasonably be expected to support. According to the president and CEO of CMHC, “Canadians are among world leaders in household debt. Pre-COVID, the ratio of ... debt to GDP for Canada was at 99 per cent.... These ratios are well in excess of the 80 per cent threshold above which the Bank of International Settlements has shown that national debt intensifies the drag on GDP growth.” In other words, an international body like the Bank for International Settlements says that countries should not go above 80%, and yet pre-COVID we were at nearly 100%. Since that time, debt levels have risen even higher. That is the third criterion for a forthcoming debt crisis, rising household leverage. Now we move onto the next one, which is asset inflation. In Canada today, the assets that Canadians own in the country are worth 17 times the size of the Canadian economy. The historic average is 12 times. In other words, our asset values are quickly outpacing our economy. That cannot go on for long, because, of course, assets can only be purchased out of the income generated in the economy. Those assets break down into two parts: financial assets and real estate assets, more or less. With financial assets, we look at the S&P/TSX, the broadest index in the country. Until a few years ago, the market value of that index had never exceeded the size of our economy. It was always smaller than GDP. That changed in the last 24 months, and has suddenly rocketed up to 120%, according to Rosenberg Research, a leading economic research firm. That one index is now worth 120% of GDP. That has never happened before. The companies in that index need to generate their profits from the economy, and therefore the value of the stocks on the index cannot get completely out of touch with the ability of the economy to generate income and support those stock prices. Then we move on to real estate, where prices are up $65,000 this year. Can members imagine that in a year when our economy has lost over $100 billion in economic output and hundreds of thousands of people have lost their paycheques and been forced into their homes that somehow we found all of this money to buy real estate? In fact, from the beginning of 2019 to mid-2020, the inflation of our assets in this country has been worth more than our entire economy. There has been $2.7 trillion of asset inflation in an economy worth just over $2 trillion. That would be like someone making more money every year from the appreciation of their house than the salary they take home from work. It would be nice if it could happen forever and we could simply float on a bubble up to prosperity, but we know that in the end our assets are only worth what we can afford to pay for them. Can Canadians afford the real estate they have right now? Members can ask RBC and the CMHC. The CMHC says that for a home to be affordable for a family, the family should not have to spend more than 30% of its income on housing. According to RBC, the average right now is 50%. That means that for the average person to afford the average house, 20 percentage points more from their family budgets has to go to housing. That is with record low interest rates. When rates rise, those payments will only become more expensive. Do we have asset inflation in Canada? We have it like we have perhaps never seen before. Asset inflation is the fourth leading indicator of a forthcoming debt crisis. This brings us to the final leading indicator that these Harvard economists developed through studying 800 years of history of debt crises, which is current account deficits. To oversimplify this for the purpose of saving us some time, current account deficits are basically the amounts someone buys in excess of what they sell. In essence, Canada buys imports and sells exports. The truth is that we buy a lot more from the rest of the world than we sell to it. Since 2015 to the present, Canada has run current account deficits of approximately $300 billion. In other words, we bought $300 billion more from the world than we sold to it, and we borrowed to make up the difference. How else would we do it? If we buy more than we are selling, there are only two ways to do it: we drain our savings or we rack up debt. We have been doing a little of both, but most of all, we have been adding debt. The result is that we are taking on more and more obligations for our prior consumption. I would like to say that all of this debt has been used to invest in productive assets like factories, software, patents and other things that will generate income to pay off that debt, but the evidence shows that the overwhelming preponderance of the new debt has been going to immediate consumption. In fact, data from after the government's programs came in, programs that I believe were meritorious and had to happen, showed that much of the money leaked out of the country because, as Canadians, we were all buying or importing things from abroad more than we were producing and sending abroad. That means that last year we were again running a large trade deficit and adding to our overall debt load in the process. In the months of April and May 2020, Canadians borrowed an extra $80 billion from foreigners according to David Dodge, who published a recent piece on this for the Public Policy Forum. He specifically asked how long it will be possible for Canadians, for our country, to borrow from the world in order to buy from the world before the world gets tired of lending us money. The bottom line is that we have a large and consistent current account deficit, the second-largest in the G7, second only to Japan's. That is an unavoidable problem that we will need to confront, because the world is not going to view our economy as a charity case. The lenders of the world will expect to be paid interest on all of the debt that we carry forward. In fact, the only way to pay off that debt is to generate powerful incomes. Unfortunately, since 2012 Canada has exported more investment than it has brought in by a net amount of $800 billion. In other words, we are sending our investment to productive assets in other parts of the world, while they are sending us debt. They get factories, software, patents or pipelines, and we get large-scale debt. That is the fifth measurement of whether or not a debt crisis will strike, and we can say definitively that with our $300 billion in current account deficits in the last five years, Canada indeed meets this standard leading indicator that is necessary to trigger a debt crisis. There are five indicators, and we check every single box. What can we do about it? The answer is that we need to unleash the power of our productive economy to clear the way for job creation. This is red tape week. Let us eliminate the red tape that prevents businesses from hiring. Let us approve large-scale projects like the Teck Frontier mine in Alberta, or the LNG facility in Saguenay. These are tens of billions of dollars in economic activity. Let us make this the fastest place in the world to get a construction permit. Right now we rank 34th out of 35 OECD nations on that. Let us be the fastest place to build a factory or build a pipeline or some other economic infrastructure that pays wages and can reimburse our debts and support our prosperity. Let us change the tax and regulatory rules that get in the way of first nation communities trying to develop commerce and resources on their reserves. Let us remove the penalties for low-income people to get off social assistance so that they can get back to work. Let us allow our newcomers as immigrants use their qualifications by giving them permits to work in fields they are qualified in, like the professions and the trades. Let us replace what has become a credit card economy with a paycheque economy, and in that way alone, we will secure our future.

Madam Speaker, the member asked what we would have done differently. First, we would not have gone into this crisis having already added $100 billion of debt before the very first case of COVID-19. That is the first thing. The Liberal government inherited a balanced budget and blew through $100 billion of debt before COVID-19 even arrived on the scene. Second, we would have ensured that the COVID crisis would not have spun out of control here in Canada the way it did, because we would have closed the border. We told the Liberals and we are on the record as saying we would have closed the border. They had military intelligence in December telling them of the risk, yet they let 60,000 people come into this country from China between December and March, causing the disease to spread quickly. We would have approved rapid testing more quickly so that Canadians could get back into their jobs safely. We would have procured vaccines on a priority basis, rather than leaving us at the back of the pack. All of these things would have saved a fortune. Finally, what would we do differently going forward? When we come out of the COVID crisis, we would unleash the engine of free market productive economic growth that produces paycheques for people, rather than shutting down the economy by blocking enterprises, as the Liberal government has done in project after project. We also reject their proposal to make all the COVID spending permanent. In this bill, they have asked for an increase in the debt limit of another $700 billion. That is irresponsible.

Madam Speaker, the Conservative Party clearly supports the aerospace sector. I am a little surprised to hear the Bloc Québécois is of the same opinion, because the aerospace sector uses fuel. Airplanes run on fuel. To my knowledge, there is not a single airplane that can fly without fuel. Furthermore, petroleum products represent the lion's share of our exports. We support all industries. Our aerospace sector has the ability to compete globally. This would also mean that our airplanes would be fuelled by the cleanest and most ethical oil, oil from Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland.

Madam Speaker, first, that is a complete falsehood. Conservatives have spoken out against corporate welfare. We were the first party to stand in the House and insist that the wage subsidy not go to paying dividends. I warned, on the floor of this House of Commons, the then finance minister, Bill Morneau, that if he did not ban it, corporations would use the wage subsidy to pay dividends to executives and wealthy shareholders. He ignored me, and that is exactly what they did. We, on this side, were the ones who spoke out against it. We are the party that opposes corporate welfare. However, the member asked about these tax revenues that they want to generate by closing loopholes and shutting down, as we call them in French, the “paradis fiscaux”. Of course we agree that everybody should pay their own fair share, but I find that when these left-wing governments take office, although they always claim that rich people will pay, rich people never end up paying, and it ends it being the middle class and the working people who get the full bill. The current government cannot produce a single, solitary shred of evidence that it is raising any new money from the rich. Yes, the Liberals raised the rate, but there is not one annual filing from Revenue Canada that shows it generated a nickel in new revenue. The poor will end up paying for—

That is a good question, Madam Speaker. The reality is we have to secure the future by moving to a paycheque economy from a credit card economy. The credit card economy that the government wants to create would permanently lock in annual spending increases forever and add another $600 billion of debt. That is what the Liberals are seeking authorization for in this bill: to raise the national debt to $1.8 trillion. That is the credit card economy. It only ends in tears. The paycheque economy is one in which we unleash the power of enterprise to build pipelines so that the steelworkers in the member's riding can actually get jobs making the steel that goes into that pipe and the energy sector workers can get full global prices for their oil, rather than letting the Americans continue to rip us off. It means unleashing the construction of the Teck Frontier mine, for which the permit could still be approved, or expediting the approval of the LNG, a $14-billion project in Saguenay that could put thousands of Quebeckers permanently to work exporting clean, green Canadian natural gas that will lower global emissions by displacing dirty foreign coal. This is the kind of free enterprise agenda that would produce paycheques, and paycheques alone will secure our future.

With regard to information held by the Bank of Canada: (a) what was the total combined purchase price of all the Government of Canada bonds that the Bank of Canada purchased on the secondary market since March 1, 2020; (b) what was the total combined purchase price of the bonds listed in (a) when originally auctioned on the primary market; (c) what was the average sale price of (i) 90-day treasuries, (ii) one-year bonds, (iii) two-year bonds, (iv) three-year bonds, (v) five-year bonds, (vi) 10-year bonds, (vii) 30-year bonds, since March 1, 2020, to the primary market; (d) what is the average sale price of (i) 90-day treasuries, (ii) one-year bonds, (iii) two-year bonds, (iv) three-year bonds, (v) five-year bonds, (vi) 10-year bonds, (vii) 30-year bonds at the time of issuance paid by all purchasers, other than the Bank of Canada; (e) what was the average purchase price paid by the Bank of Canada for (i) 90-day treasuries, (ii) one-year bonds, (iii) two-year bonds, (iv) three-year bonds, (v) five-year bonds, (vi) 10-year bonds, (vii) 30-year bonds; (f) what is the actual answer or information contained in any URL links provided in the response in (a) through (e), if applicable; and (g) what are the details of all corporate bonds that the Bank of Canada has purchased since March 1, 2020, including the (i) name of the company, (ii) purchase and price per unit, (iii) date of the purchase, (iv) total amount of the purchase?