The reality is that we don't have a funding source to pay for this proposal. People have pointed to past investments: those were budgeted and they were passed into effect at a time when there was a surplus.
Mr. Sullivan speaks of the Peterborough line. I think that was in the 2007 budget. That was a budget that had a multi-billion dollar surplus. There were dollars available at the time for that. There were also major rail investments throughout the economic action plan phase. That program has now lapsed. The economic action plan stimulus funding is not going to be renewed.
When we propose more money for anything in a deficit environment, we have to be more specific as to where it's going to come from. The term “general revenues” is a sanitized term used to mean taxpayers. The Government of Canada actually doesn't have any money; it's the taxpayers that have money. We collect it from them and they don't have any extra.... I don't get constituents calling me up to say, “I have extra money that I need you to spend for me”.
We look at our budgetary balance and it is in the deficit position. We have to get out of a deficit position as soon as possible. As a result, we can't make any new, unfunded commitments to anybody. That's the reality.
We're going to introduce a budget. I predict that my opposition colleagues are going to be very upset that there will be a discontinuation of funding for a lot of different programs. We'll be finding significant savings across the board, and they will oppose every single effort to save money and simultaneously demand that we spend more. The question for them is, where are they going to get all of this money? It's not enough to just say that you're going to tax big business more.
Every single time the opposition comes forward with a spending proposal, they take it from the same pot. As for the corporate tax hike they've proposed, they've spent it 40 times now. In every committee, I'm sure, there is a proposal that costs taxpayers money, and every time the opposition is asked how they will fund it, they say, “Well, we'll raise taxes on business”. If every single funding proposal the opposition has sought from a committee were stacked one on top of the other and paid for with higher taxes on Canadian businesses, the business tax rate would be like 5,000% by now.
If they want a brand-new program to pay for these things, then I would ask them to come forward with a specific program in which they're willing to cut elsewhere to free up the money, and I was ask that they commit to only cutting that program for this purpose. They can only cut it once.
You can't say.... I hear the member say F-35s. So they're going to ground the air force. You can only do that once. You can't then go to another committee and say you're going to ground the air force to fund this program as well. You have to choose how you're going to spend the money that is out there.
By the way, you might want to come up with a proposal for keeping our airmen and -women flying at the same time. That also costs money.
At the end of the day, we're not going to vote for one-off proposals in every single committee—no matter how small they may appear by themselves to be—to accumulate a massive spending obligation for which there is no funding source. Though my colleagues across the way have, in their typical manner, made very good and well-researched arguments, and I respect the fact that they've done so in good faith and that they put time and effort into this motion, I can't support it for the reasons so stated.
Thank you.
