Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to participate in the budget debate. At the outset, there is no question that this is the worst budget that this government has ever produced. I would argue that commentators around the country are drawing that conclusion.
I reluctantly admit, in the past the government made some good decisions. In fact, it accepted many of the arguments of the official opposition, the Canadian Alliance, and before that the Reform Party. Because of that, it was to some degree successful in balancing the budget and doing a few other things.
However this budget is an unmitigated disaster. Why? I will run through it. It is a missed opportunity. The government had the chance to address some real concerns that Canadians had with respect for instance to security. What did it do in the end with respect national defence? It dropped the ball. There will be $100 million a going into national defence when we had people like the auditor general and members of the Canadian Defence Association recommending $2 billion a year.
On one hand, the government pleads poverty. On the other hand it did not reallocate one cent from low priority areas to high priority areas. The member from Markham, the parliamentary secretary, sits on the finance committee. He knows very well that the finance committee recommended that money be reallocated from low and falling priorities to higher priorities, areas like national defence. Did his government do it. No way. I would like to hear his response to that later.
The government has gone into a planning deficit. I know the parliamentary secretary is duty bound, and his intellectual honesty binds him, to acknowledge that that is true. It has gone into a planning deficit based on the rules that it had in place until this year, but it eliminated the prudence factor, the contingency reserves to a large degree. Under the current rules, the government has avoided being in that planning deficit. However by the rules that it had up until last year, it would have been in a planning deficit. There is no question of that. In fact, a lot of commentators believe that it will be an actual deficit as of next year, and the government is doing all kinds of creative bookkeeping to try to avoid that spectacle.
For a number of reasons there are problems with the budget. To my friend from Yukon, he should not labour under the illusion that the official opposition does not have problems with the budget. We have huge problems with it.
I addressed a number of things that bother me right off the top, but I want to say a few more words and get into a little more detail about one thing the budget really fails to do, which is address the long term decline in the Canadian standard of living.
At a time when the dollar hit five new lows in the month of November alone, it is interesting to me that the budget, that big stack of papers, did not mention the dollar once. It speaks volumes about the intellectual honesty, I would argue, of the people who were addressing some of these issues. Clearly that is on the minds of Canadians.
My friend from Markham, I think would acknowledge, that the dollar is some kind of a barometer of the health of the Canadian economy relative to the United States, our largest trading partner and competitor, a country with whom we used to share a very similar standard of living. As my friend knows, Canada's standard of living dropped in the last year. Between 1999 and the year 2000, our standard of living, according to at least one study, fell by $100, from $17,900 roughly to about $17,800.
I would think that it would be something that the government would be concerned enough about to actually address in its budget, but it did not do it. To me that is unbelievable. Again, the dollar is the harbinger of what is happening with respect to the standard of living.
It was only a year and a half ago, maybe not even that long ago, when the current foreign affairs minister was the industry minister. His department produced a report that said the average standard of living in Canada had fallen below that of the poorest of the American states. That was what the industry department.