Stephen Harper on Program Spending

On March 24th, 2004 at 3:25 p.m., Stephen Harper Leader of the Opposition (Canadian Alliance) rose in the House of Commons and stated:

Only a few short years ago the Government of Canada had projected program spending of just a little over $100 billion. Today this budget projects program spending well over $150 billion. It is an increase of 50% in only a few short years.

Mr. Harper, let's look at your record so far. At the end of this year you are projecting a program spending of $238 billion, or over 42% increase after five years. You are way above the Liberal growth. They went from program spending of $120 billion which they took over from Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative Government to $176 billion in their last year, or an average of 4.3% growth per year. Your government has grown program spending at a rate of 8.4% per year. If we look at your projected spending for 2014-15 which is after the "stimulus" spending has ceased, you will still have grown 47% or 5.2% per year.

As you yourself said in your statement

It is a Liberal Conservative regime that cannot be trusted to manage our public funds.

Note the data sources are the same as my earlier post on Jim Flaherty's Expenses. The difference between Program Spending and total Expenses is the public debt charges. They were around $30 billion annually, but will increase over 30% (to $40 billion) with all the new debt we have been acquiring recently. The one additional source is from the 1995 budget which states in the Expenditure Outlook section of the Fiscal Outlook fact sheet that program expenses were $120 billion in 1993-94.