Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to reply to the Speech from the Throne.
Following the Speech from the Throne a journalist asked me what I thought of it. I said that it was just words on paper. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. In other words, the government has to act on some of its promises because that is what it amounts to, things the government would like to do, things it is interested in doing.
To make my point, I want to go through some of the promises made by the Liberal government since 1999. I could go back a little further than that, because there were other promises made. Possibly I could touch on those as well.
One of the interesting things is that of the 114 promises in the 1999 and 2001 Liberal throne speeches, about a third of them were completely ignored at the time of the 2002 throne speech. Another 28 promises were incomplete or, get this, too vague to measure. The 2002 throne speech outlined 85 promises, reiterating many from the earlier throne speeches of which little or no action was taken on 33 promises.
If it does not get done between throne speeches, just re-promise it. That is the strategy of the government. If the government keeps saying it long enough, I guess people will believe it. The fact is the government has a horrible track record in following through on those commitments.
Between 1999 and 2002 only 23% of the promises made in successive throne speeches have actually been implemented. Quick arithmetic will tell us that 77% of the government's promises have been broken. That would lead us to believe the words that I originally used with that journalist, that they are words on paper. That is it. The government has no commitment or follow-through on most of its promises.
In fact, when we look at the Prime Minister, he is the man who single-handedly authored the red books. We have had successive red books and of course the history of implementation of the red book is worse than throne speeches. We will not get into that because it is probably getting a little too political and we would not want that to happen on the floor of the House.
The Prime Minister is the man who said that the GST would be scrapped. That one obviously did not happen.