Red Deer - Lacombe Conservative MP Blaine Calkins.

By Sheldon Spackman

Concerned With Large Spending

Local MPs unimpressed with federal budget

Apr 20, 2021 | 1:15 PM

The federal budget announced by the Liberal government on Monday is being described by the Conservative MP from Red Deer – Lacombe, as a complete abandonment of any fiscal responsibility.

Blaine Calkins says Canada has already accrued over $350 billion in new federal debt just last year alone to deal with the pandemic and its support programs, with a roughly equal amount now being added to that.

“It will put us on a path to what will inevitably be higher taxes and greater economic pain for future generations. We’re paying for today by mortgaging our children’s future, and that’s the frustrating part for me,” fumes Calkins. “The same results could have easily been achieved by getting government out of the way. Instead of downloading continuous regulation and burdens on provinces and of course businesses, all we’re doing is making things more expensive for everybody and ultimately for consumers.”

Calkins says the budget is obviously an election campaign budget.

“It’s all money for everybody for everything, but somebody, sometime at some point in the future is going to have to pay for this,” warns Calkins. “We now owe more debt than the entire size of our Canadian economy and once this budget is in place, we will be relying on economic growth to outpace inflation and interest rates in order to stay fiscally solvent.”

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Calkins adds, however, there could have been more investment in infrastructure, especially broadband which did receive a $1 billion investment over the next six years to the Universal Broadband Fund to support a more rapid rollout of broadband projects in collaboration with provinces, territories and other partners.

“We need to invest in that infrastructure to make sure that all Canadians can fully participate in the economy and we know what pressures COVID has put on our internet and our ability to do e-commerce,” says Calkins. “We need to improve our roads and our national transportation systems, we could have done more to create a national utility/energy corridor to make doing business more predictable, but again, these ideas we have presented numerous times, but they have been put aside for other priorities in other parts of the country.”

The federal budget’s Canada-wide early learning and child care system proposing to reduce fees for parents with children in regulated childcare by 50 per cent on average by 2022, with a goal of reaching $10 per day on average by 2026, is also questioned by Calkins.

“Well I’m sure it has great intention, I just don’t know if it’s affordable,” suggests Calkins. “The province of Quebec has had a similar program that they’ve had some problems with but it was largely funded by equalization payments coming from the rest of the country. I don’t see how the other nine provinces and three territories are going to be able to fiscally afford $10 a day daycare, but we’ll see how that goes.”

Red Deer – Mountain View Conservative MP Earl Dreeshen, says the Liberal government has chosen to embark on a dangerous and untested economic experiment at a time when tens of thousands of Canadians in the energy sector remain out of work and many small and medium-sized businesses are still struggling to stay afloat.

“Justin Trudeau’s reimagined economy is a risky, Ottawa-knows-best approach that picks winners and losers by deciding which jobs, sectors and regions of our country will be prosperous,” says Dreeshen, in a press release. “This unproven and incompetent economic approach threatens the personal financial security of everyone here in Alberta and all workers across the country.”

Dreeshen says the government’s focus should not be on the quantity of spending but on the quality of the investments made in Canada’s long- term prosperity.

He says Canada’s Conservatives have called on the government to introduce sector-specific support for businesses rather than a “one-size-fits-all” approach, including a focus on the small-and medium-sized business sector.