The federal government released its annual budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year earlier this week and it's drawing criticisms from the opposition.

Robert Kitchen, the Conservative MP for the Souris-Moose Mountain riding, says that the budget contains over 400 pages of information that don't say enough.

His biggest criticism was the amount that the federal government was spending this year was too high.

"Ultimately what it does is it points out that this government is going to spend over $40 billion more on things and doesn't take the time to explain where that money is coming from. The points that they put in there where they focus on aspects of what they don't highlight are issues, for example, the GST revenue that they are going to collect will be $51.5 billion in this fiscal year 2023-2024 and when you look at that is basically being collected to service that the interest on the national debt."

Kitchen also criticized the total national debt number, which comes out to $1.282 trillion in this budget.

Housing was one of the keynote features of the budget, with Kitchen saying that the last few weeks of housing announcements won't be enough to change the country's real estate woes.

"The reality is that they haven't built anything with the steps that they've done and that's the shocking part about it. Ultimately they continue to talk about all these homes that are going to be built, but they haven't done any of that at this point in time and that's a huge challenge for municipalities and provinces to get that done."

"The municipalities need to have some understanding of how they do things and where infrastructure money needs to come to put in the infrastructure in the first place and that's a huge challenge that municipalities have." 

While the federal government has hailed the capital gains tax increase as a way to raise revenue from richer Canadians, Kitchen says he's unconvinced that middle-class Canadians won't eventually feel a pinch.

"This government basically and has continually said that the rich are going to have to pay for the cost of all this spending. But what we all know is that everyday Canadians are the ones that are having to pay, that they're the ones that have continually had to pay."

"The steps that are being put forward here are, when you look at them and look at how they're being put forward, ultimately it's going to be the small businesses, it's going to be the professionals that are going to have huge impacts on this and that's going to be a huge challenge as we move forward." 

Kitchen says that he wouldn't give specifics on what a Conservative government budget would look like.

"I can't speak to what will happen. We need to make certain that we aren't handicapping Canadians today and that the agenda we're on at this point in time and as we move forward, those issues will be brought forward."