Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak on Bill C-99, the amendment to the Small Business Loans Act.
The summary of the bill concerns me. The bill states: "This enactment amends the Small Business Loans Act with the objective of moving the small business loans program to full cost recovery". I thought that the whole concept of the Small Business Loans Act was for the government to try to provide some underlying guarantee of picking winners and losers, because let us face it, it has been in that business for a long time, through grants, subsidies, contributions and giving away money by the millions and billions. As an aside, did you see my waste report where $11 billion in grants and contributions are given away by this government every year?
Getting back to the bill, the concept of the Small Business Loans Act was to provide a guarantee to higher risk businesses that had the potential to generate jobs and economic growth. The government was prepared to underwrite that program to try to foster development. It is not a bad idea, although we Reformers always felt that a dollar in the hands of an investor was far better than a dollar channelled through a bureaucrat and back into the economy. Nonetheless, the government is now going to channel this money through the bureaucrat back into the economy on a full cost recovery basis. The first question which comes to mind is: Why are we doing this?