QUESTION PERIOD — Finance
Government Spending
May 22, 2024
Senator Gold, when Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015, Canada’s debt was $619 billion. In just eight and a half years of spending like drunken sailors, the debt has more than doubled to over $1.4 trillion. The end result is $54 billion a year of costs in just servicing the debts on the shoulders of taxpayers. The estimate is that it will reach $64 billion in the next few years.
What is worse is that this could have been avoided if your finance minister had the intelligence to lock more of our debt into long-term bonds when rates were as low as 0.25%. Instead, she issued two thirds of our debt in short-term bonds that are now coming due for refinancing at rates of 5%.
Senator Gold, you have to admit that it takes a special kind of incompetence on the part of this Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance to be so short-sighted. Will they accept responsibility for their negligence?
The government takes responsibility within the scope of its actual ability to influence these things and for the fact that our economy is doing well, notwithstanding — and I underline notwithstanding — the challenges that families continue to face.
But the facts do speak for themselves more than the rhetoric: The inflation rate in Canada is down to 2.7% from 8% in July 2022. I recall in this chamber how skeptical and dismissive you were when I stood up and said that the government was on track to manage inflation and bring it down. Well, that’s what is happening. Almost a million more Canadians are employed than before the pandemic. The International Monetary Fund, or IMF — it is my turn to answer the questions, colleagues. The IMF and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, project that Canada will have the strongest economic growth in the G7.
This government does not claim credit for things that are beyond its control, like worldwide inflation or supply chains, but it will take credit for managing this economy through difficult times as well as it has.
Senator Gold, an historic number of Canadians are living in their parents’ basements because the cost of living is off the charts. They are historic numbers. You are spending $54 billion a year in servicing the debt in this country. You have driven up more than you are actually putting into health care, food banks are bursting at the seams and you have the audacity to stand up and tell us how well Canadians and this country are doing. Get your heads out of the sand and join the Canadian public who are suffering. Take responsibility by firing this finance minister, and fire your Prime Minister already.
That’s not a question.
There wasn’t a question there, but your passion is —
There was no answer on your side, either.
In my previous answer to your leader, Senator Housakos, I underlined the understanding that this government and I have about the difficulties Canadians are facing. I also provided you with fact-based answers as to how this economy is actually doing under the management of this government. I stand by those answers.
