Mr. Speaker, being a new kid on the block, I expected to see a lot of things happen that really did not happen. Of course it has been said to me before that I will learn the process and learn that certain things will happen, but as a society we should not accept what the government is doing.
It seems like the government, for some reason or another, is building half a house, then shutting it down, waiting for the fall to come and building it again. If it starts something it should finish the process. Because of that, the House should not allow it to bring things back just for the sake of bringing them back. If the government had been concerned about the issues that were at hand, it never would have shut down debate, closed down and sent us all home for the summer. We should have been here.
Mr. Mayor--I apologize, Mr. Speaker, that is from my councillor background. The EI system is one of those items we should be talking about rather than going back to the past and bringing bills back again that were half done. We should be looking at the EI system and what it is doing, especially in rural areas of the country.
For some reason the federal government is the only government that can get away with top up programs and not have to pay its workers who are on these top up programs. It is a total shame what the government is doing to people in rural Canada, especially in rural Newfoundland and Labrador, in my area.
We can talk about the health care system and how the government has cut, cut, cut. All of a sudden it has a big brain scheme about the new health care system into which it wants to put all these dollars. The government took the dollars away and now it wants to put it back because it will be good for the government if an election is called down the road, or for the Prime Minister.
The thing is that the government has failed the people totally. We can look at what it has done with regard to the appointment of people with Marine Atlantic. That ferry service supplies all of Canada but the people who are most affected by it are people from Newfoundland and Labrador. Of course we do not have a proper representation, a full quota of people from Newfoundland and Labrador.
The government has stayed solid. My office has been flooded with phone calls wondering where the Newfoundland minister is. I do not know where he is. Apparently he is doing a lot of talking behind closed doors but it is not being effective. People are very concerned that our livelihood, our ferry service that connects us to the rest of Canada, has totally been affected.
Those are the things that we should be talking about in the House rather than bringing back items that for some reason the government did not feel were important but now they are important. It should be the law that the government should not be allowed to do that, but for some reason it has the attitude, as the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador had, which is that it had the majority and it could do as it liked. We should not allow it to do that and Canadians should not allow it to do that because that is just total arrogance. The government has no respect for the Canadian taxpayer.
I made a speech during labour day. All the politicians were there talking about health care. They did not know what they were talking about. I spent 22 years here. I know what is happening in health care. The politicians are not listening.
I am learning quickly. We should be working for the people. We should be putting programs in place so people can function in society as a total unit without having to beg for things that are rightly ours.
Let us talk about the military. We know what happened after 9/11. The government did not do very much to bring more spending into the military. What did it do? All of a sudden contracts went out to the supply chain. For goodness' sake, the zippers on the servicemen's pants will not stay up. They are going around with their pants not properly secured. Submarines are going down but cannot get up. It is totally ridiculous. We need to start spending more money on the military. What is the government doing? It is going to do a review. What a waste of time. It already knows how to do it. It just needs to do it and do it right.
It is like I said earlier, the government is building half a house. If it is not going to do the job right in the first place, it is time for it to get out and let another government do the job.
I can go on to the air service. I believe the minister was in the House last week. I do not know exactly what he said, but from what I understand he said that everything was fine in rural Canada and rural Newfoundland and Labrador with regard to air transportation. The minister does not realize what people have to go through to get a flight back to Ottawa. It is totally ridiculous. The hon. Gerry Byrne knows because he flies back and forth all the time.