Committee
Consult the user guide
For assistance, please contact us
Consult the user guide
For assistance, please contact us
Add search criteria
Results: 1 - 15 of 222
View Ted Falk Profile
CPC (MB)
View Ted Falk Profile
2021-05-18 17:14
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all of the witnesses. I enjoyed hearing your various comments and testimonies.
I'd like to ask Mr. Moody a few questions. You indicated in your opening comments about the size of the budget—724 pages—with this bill being 366 in all, how extremely extensive it is and that to give it an adequate study it would take a lot more time than what we're doing.
You also talked about inflation, and I've had the same experience you've had. I know that when I go to the grocery store groceries cost more. They're telling me a sheet of OSB for building houses was $8 a year ago. Today there's a limit on it at $80 a sheet. A homebuilder, on the weekend, told me it costs an average of $40,000 more this year to build a home than it did a year ago. RVs and autos are more expensive. Housing and even the cost of everyday goods and services have seen, for the most part, a significant increase. We know that inflation is happening, and we know when inflation happens interest rates are going to increase.
Have you done any calculations as to what size of a rate shock Canada can afford on its debt?
View Pierre Paul-Hus Profile
CPC (QC)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, Mr. Minister.
My regards also to the officials with you today.
Mr. Duclos, you are the President of the Treasury Board, as well as an economist. In the document that I am about to show you, you will see figure 1, dealing with the composition of expenditures in the Main Estimates 2021-2022. You will see a green circle, indicating the cost of servicing the debt.
This year's budget shows $21 billion for servicing the debt.
Does that concern you?
View Pierre Paul-Hus Profile
CPC (QC)
Mr. Duclos, you know that I do not have a lot of time.
I want to know whether it concerns you. I especially want to know whether you have assessed the impact that a 1% increase in the interest rate could have on Canada's finances.
View Pierre Paul-Hus Profile
CPC (QC)
So your answer is that you are not concerned about the medium-term impact of a possible rise in interest rates for Canada and its taxpayers.
As the parliamentary budget officer has indicated, an increase of only 1% would have impacts on society as a whole and on all taxpayers.
Does that concern you?
View Ed Fast Profile
CPC (BC)
View Ed Fast Profile
2021-05-11 16:13
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for appearing before committee again.
I again want to congratulate you for being the first female finance minister to deliver a federal budget and, hopefully, it's the first of many to be delivered by women in the future.
I do note, however, that this is also the largest spending budget ever and creates the largest debt and deficits in our country's history. My fear is that future generations will look back on this budget as the one that created a financial burden that undermined their prospects of living the Canadian dream. I certainly hope that is not the case and that, in fact, Canadians still have the prospect of a bright future ahead of them.
With that in mind, I want to refer you to not only the fall economic statement, but also the budget that this BIA implements.
I note that in the fall economic statement you projected GDP growth at 4.8%, but the budget says that it's going to be better than that; it's going to be 5.8%. You projected in the fall that revenues would be around $335 billion. Now, in the budget, you're predicting that it's going to be better than that, and we're going to have $20 billion more. With more cash coming in by way of revenues and more economic growth predicted in this budget, you're still projecting a deficit that is higher than what you projected in the fall economic statement.
The same is true in 2022-23, which is the next fiscal year. Again, the projected revenues are going to be up by about $20 billion, so you have more revenue coming in, more money in the bank account, and your growth is projected to be close to 1% higher than the fall economic statement had suggested, yet you're predicting a deficit that is $9 billion higher than the fall economic statement.
My concern is this. We have better growth; we have higher government revenues in this year and the next, yet, for some reason, you're not only spending all of the unexpected additional revenue, you're also increasing the amount you're going to borrow each year. We're going backwards, big time.
For every extra dollar that comes in in revenue, you seem to think that you can spend that dollar and then borrow even more than you had initially projected, so how is that a sustainable fiscal and debt management plan?
View Ed Fast Profile
CPC (BC)
View Ed Fast Profile
2021-04-27 17:18
Thank you very much, Mr. Giroux. It's good to see you at committee.
There are some who have suggested that we shouldn't get our knickers in a knot about the size of the debt because debt servicing costs are so low. However, there are some fears that the Bank of Canada rate may rise earlier than expected, perhaps some time in 2022.
Can you speak to the risk of rising interest rates, and has your office modelled what each 1% increase in rates would mean for the debt that the federal government has incurred over the last six years?
View Tamara Jansen Profile
CPC (BC)
Okay. The Department of Finance's own numbers say we could be back within spitting distance of more historical deficit numbers as early as the next fiscal year with no austerity measures necessary.
What risk does Canada face with taking on this enormous debt, considering the fact that interest rates are on the move and all signs point to rising inflation?
View Ted Falk Profile
CPC (MB)
View Ted Falk Profile
2021-04-27 18:01
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you to Mr. Giroux and your associates there.
We've seen significant increases in the cost of everything this last year. Food has gone up, and real estate has gone up 20% to 100% depending on what area of the country you live in. Crude oil has seen a 300% increase this year. Wood products like OSB have seen a 500% increase.
We know that we're right around the corner from seeing significant inflation and, with that, there are going to be higher interest rates. How rate sensitive—and you partially addressed it with the $17-billion answer—is our federal debt?
View Ted Falk Profile
CPC (MB)
View Ted Falk Profile
2021-04-27 18:02
Is all of our federal debt rate sensitive? Is it all in a term and only sensitive to renewal dates, or is it also in a variable market-sensitive plan?
View Ted Falk Profile
CPC (MB)
View Ted Falk Profile
2021-04-27 18:03
The Liberal government—and you stated this in your presentation—has a fiscal anchor, and that fiscal anchor is reducing federal debt. To me that's not a fiscal anchor; it's a wish list. They haven't attached any hard stops to that. They haven't said that a 51.2% debt-to-GDP is a hard stop and they will not exceed that. They've used it as a goal there. I would liken it more to the guardrail terminology that they've been using.
The debt-to-GDP is only one of the markers. In all my years as a banker and as a businessman, if I fixated on only one ratio, I wouldn't do a service to the application or to the business. There are multiple ratios that you have to look at, and I think the government needs to establish a variety of anchors.
Are there other anchors that you as the PBO consider should be looked at and considered by this government?
View Sean Fraser Profile
Lib. (NS)
View Sean Fraser Profile
2021-04-27 18:09
I'll make it quick, then.
One piece of testimony you gave today, Monsieur Giroux, was about Canada's deficit or debt position in comparison with that of its international counterparts. It struck me that we may be a little better than middle of the pack right now.
Is that a fair assessment, insofar as it impacts our overall debt and our debt-to-GDP ratio?
View Sean Fraser Profile
Lib. (NS)
View Tamara Jansen Profile
CPC (BC)
Thank you.
Mr. Hemmings, in the OECD report you underscore the need for a transparent plan to ensure that the debt burden does not spiral out of control. Currently, Canada has one of the largest debt burdens among the developed nations, according to an article in Bloomberg. As a matter of fact, we would be top of the heap if not for Japan.
Would you agree, then, that fiscal anchors should be a keystone principle for stabilizing our debt, going forward?
View Pat Kelly Profile
CPC (AB)
Thank you.
I'll keep Mr. Cross going and ask him a question.
Given your testimony just now, what do you make of Bill C-14's unprecedented expansion and raising of Canada's debt ceiling? There's no budget, so we don't know why the debt ceiling would need to be raised. The debt ceiling is part of a second act, and we don't even know why it would necessarily be connected to this bill, which implements the fall economic statement.
Mr. Cross, what do you make of adding hundreds of billions of dollars to Canada's debt ceiling?
View Julie Dzerowicz Profile
Lib. (ON)
The other thing you're alluding to and you're reminding me about also, Mr. Macdonald, is the fact that if the federal government didn't take on the debt, we have heard from others that there would be worse repercussions for the economy and, as you just mentioned, there would be far higher debt levels whether on corporations or on the provinces.
We have often heard our Minister of Finance say that the government is taking on the debt so that Canadians don't need to. Do you think that's a fair statement?
Results: 1 - 15 of 222 | Page: 1 of 15

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
>
>|
Export As: XML CSV RSS

For more data options, please see Open Data