Mr. Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to speak on the budget implementation act, Bill C-28.
I find the dialogue we have had very interesting. The Liberal government feels it has done a really good job and we in opposition have been challenging where it has been spending Canadian tax dollars. It gets down to the original premise of what is government for and on what criteria does it collect money from taxpayers.
Basically, one has to start on the premise of should government be all encompassing and huge, or should government be as small as it possibly can be and provide the necessary services to Canadians and, therefore, have a need for less money to do that.
There have been many debates. In the House we heard another debate on what the role of the federal government should be. In Newfoundland and Labrador some people feel the federal government should no longer be controlling the fishing off the east coast because of the poor policy decisions that have been made, which have cost Newfoundlanders and Labradorians their fishing industry.
People on the west coast feel the federal government has not done an adequate job in international trade in protecting our softwood lumber industry or, for that matter, our salmon industry, our fishing industry on the west coast.
As Canadians, we have to decide what is it we expect from our federal government that we are willing to pay taxes to support. The message I hear and have heard over the last 10 years from my constituents is they expect the federal government to decrease its size, not increase its size. Canadians would like to see smaller government and getting out of their lives in a meaningful way, rather than the government growing and becoming more involved in the ordinary day to day operations of taxpayers.
It grieves me to acknowledge that what we have seen in Canada over the last 10 years is not a decrease in government size but an increase. There has been a 20% increase of senior management in the federal civil service over the last number of years. That is not decreasing the size of the federal government. That is increasing the size.
Why does the government do this? Because the federal government is getting into areas where it does not belong. It is getting into areas of providing programs for Canadians where quite honestly it should not be. Then one has to ask why is the government doing this? The government is doing this to get credit for it from the taxpayers. A more cynical person would say that the government is buying votes because often it does these sorts of things right before an election.
One of my federal Liberal colleagues asked an opposition member where he would spend the dollar if it was up to the him. That is a question the one has to address. Where are the priorities? Where does the federal government accept the responsibilities given to it constitutionally and where are its priorities?
I think Canadians are starting to feel that the priorities of the government are very misplaced. We have a gun registry that will cost upwards of a billion dollars by the year 2005. I can talk about the fuel rebate program which the Liberals introduced just prior to the 2000 election. That cost $1.2 billion. Three years later we are still paying individuals, even though it was established as an emergency fuel cost rebate.
It is those kinds of programs. It is Groupaction. It is the problems that we had with money that was not very well managed in HRDC. It is the federal Liberal philosophy I guess of bigger government, more government, more civil servants, more programs and spending more money, and that money comes from the pocket of each taxpayer.
Day in and day out I hear taxpayers saying that they want less government. They want the government to get out of their lives and let them get on with looking after themselves.
The federal government does not belong in babysitting. The federal government does not belong in some of the programs it finds itself in. I call it photo op. It wants the credit. It wants ordinary Canadians to recognize the federal government is the one that is giving them money. Ordinary Canadians will have to realize that it is their own money. It is just going from one pocket through the Liberal government back into the other pocket. This realization has to come to Canadians in order for them to understand what it is that we in the opposition are trying to bring to their attention.
A colleague across the way said that the Liberals have paid down the national debt substantially. Percentages have been used. It is like an accountant. One can use figures to support any position one wants to take. Perhaps as a percentage of the GDP it has come down, but the net debt was revised up $27 billion to $563 billion from $536 billion in last year's budget. It is not that the amount has been decreased. The amount is actually being revised upward.
We talk about priorities again and managing the money that the federal government really should have. What we have heard from Canadians recently is that they want to see the federal government recognize its responsibility for national defence. In order to accommodate defending our country and our sovereignty and fulfilling the roles that we have internationally, more money has to be designated to it. That does not mean that it taxes us more. It means that it takes money from somewhere else and puts it into defence.
The Liberal government is the one that cut health care so substantially that it put our health care system into crisis. Yes, now it is putting the money back in, but is it being managed properly and is it sufficient? Should it be putting more money into health care and taking it away from some other field, like fuel tax rebates or some of the other programs where it is questionable that the federal government should even be involved? Canadians recognize that the federal government should be involved in national defence, immigration, international trade and foreign affairs, but I think a person could argue constitutionally whether it should be involved in all the other day to day operations that Canadians find the federal government involved in.
Having said that, one has to also look at what is the role of the national government. Quite honestly I think it is to concentrate on growing the economy of Canada. Part of that is making sure that our business community is in a position of not only competing internationally but of growing its business and creating more jobs. Anyone will tell us that the more cost to businesses through taxation, through government regulations and government fees for bureaucracies that they do not want in the first place, the greater taxation that businesses pay means less money that they have for growing their operations, for creating more opportunities and creating more jobs.
There is a relationship, whether or not the government agrees or wants believe it, between high taxation and Canadian companies leaving Canada and going into the United States or other countries, China or wherever, in order to be more competitive. If the Liberals do not think that is happening, I invite them to my constituency. Daily I see businesses that can no longer compete because of the high cost of doing business, the high taxation, high land costs, again taxation through a different form of government. They simply cannot remain in business and compete with their competition in the United States, Mexico or wherever under the circumstances they find themselves operating. The government needs to recognize that there has to be a reduction in taxation in order for the business community to grow, to grow our economy, to hire more people, to provide those jobs.
It is also a question of whether or not the government knows better than ordinary Canadians what to do with their money. I would suggest that ordinary Canadians would love dearly for the government to get out of their lives and give them more tax money to spend themselves. Let them set the priorities of who looks after their kids. Let them decide in what institution they want to be educated. Let ordinary Canadians have the ability to look after themselves and their families.
It can be done. The government can reduce the taxes for ordinary Canadians and still have enough money to use on the programs deemed necessary but there is not enough money to lower taxes if the federal government is going to get into all these spending programs it has gone into. In the budget the Liberals increased their spending by 20%. The interesting thing is that taking that extra spending, 22% of it goes to major transfers to people. That would be pensions, child tax credits and that sort of thing. Some 26% was for major transfers to other levels of government. That would be health care, education, welfare transfers to the provinces. And 52% of the increase was for direct program spending.
I find it interesting that the majority of that money can go for the federal government to increase its own spending programs. I do not remember specifically, but I think defence only got a very small increase this time around. I think the infrastructure program received a small increase from what was in the first program. Where is all the money going? It is going for those photo op programs so that the federal government before the next election can say “See what we have done for you. Here is the cheque. Look how good we are. Re-elect us”.
I hope Canadians will be smart enough to realize that the money that is being passed to them is their own money. It came out of their pockets and they have to do without in order to give the government their money in order for the government to give it back to them in specific programs.
When we talk about child tax credits and all the other programs for low income individuals, why not have anyone making $18,000 or $20,000 or less not pay income tax? Why not recognize that people making that amount of money are going to have a hard enough time paying the rent and buying food that they should not have to pay taxes? Why would we take it away from them on one hand and then give them a child tax credit on the other hand? Photo op politics. The government wants recognition for being the good guy.
It is time to stop that nonsense. It is time for the federal government to look at what are its responsibilities under the Constitution. It must look at what are the priorities of Canadians. It must stop giving corporate welfare. It must stop picking one company as a favoured child and giving it billions of dollars in contracts or billions of dollars to compete against some other company that does not get any of it. How fair is that? It is time for the government to stop this nonsense. It is time for the government to pick its priorities based on what Canadians are concerned about, not about getting re-elected in the next election.
It is time for the federal government to start being a good manager of money. I sit on the public accounts committee. I cannot tell members what it is like to sit there and hear the horror stories about how things are not recorded properly, how the rules of the game that Treasury Board has established for contracting and bidding processes are not followed through on, how the administration of the tax dollars is not being done in a forthright way with good management practices.
The gun registry is only one example. We could get into how the government has transferred land and released its obligations without any protection for the taxpayer dollars that bought that land in the first place. We can talk about all the different circumstances of where contracts have been let, looking at Groupaction, where there was nothing received for the money that we paid. We are talking about $500,000 one time, the second time $500,000 with nothing to show for it and a third time it was $500,000. We are talking about $1.5 million with very little to show for it. Not only was it badly managed, but the results were not there for the money.
That is just one example. There is a bunch of them. It is frightening to see how much of the taxpayers' hard-earned dollars fritter away and cannot really be touched.
The government has decided it is going to use third party entities for some of the program delivery. I am concerned that there is not any reporting mechanism or auditing mechanism written into it. When the government set up this arm's length organization it removed the auditing function from the Auditor General. Therefore we lost control over how that money is going to be spent or whether the rules are properly followed.
The government has to start dealing with the responsibility of spending tax dollars. It is one thing to collect more money than, I would suggest, the government should be collecting. However when it does not have proper controls and cannot go to the Canadian taxpayer and say “We have looked at how this money is being used and we can in good faith say it is being managed well”, we have a real problem in our country.
Not only is the federal government spending more money than it should, it does not have a vision for the country in growing our economy, in growing the jobs and being responsible for the spending of tax dollars. It is time that the government was replaced.
A motion to adjourn the House under Standing Order 38 deemed to have been moved.