Mr. Speaker, I will be glad to respond to the member who I understand is also an accountant.
The point I am trying to make is that the small business community is being provided this guarantee courtesy of themselves. It will have to pay for the guarantee. The successful entrepreneur will pay higher interest rates to the bank, which will in turn pay a fee back to the federal government, which will use the pot of money collected to reimburse the lenders for the bad decisions they make or for the loans that go sour and the small businessman who does not make it. The successful businessman will pay a premium to underwrite the bad debts incurred by the lenders.
This will no longer be an underwriting by the federal government. It states "loans program to full cost recovery". Therefore there will be no underwriting except a great paper war by the federal government. That is the point I am trying to object to. There is no guarantee by the federal government. It is only a guarantee to be paid by the guy who wins to pay the guy who loses.
I know that up until now the federal government has picked up the tab for the losers who have not paid back their loans, and the winners have gone on to create jobs and build this economy. Now they will to be asked to do that with another chain around their legs as they try to climb up above high taxes, high interest rates which will be even higher now because they now have to pay the federal government, the high Canadian dollar and so on. How can we expect them to compete? That is the idiocy of this bill.
Getting to the member's other point on infrastructure, of course taxes pay for infrastructure. Of course we need infrastructure. However, the promise at the last election was jobs, jobs, jobs through the infrastructure program. The President of the Treasury Board said: "Six billion dollars netted us 8,000 permanent jobs". That, by simple math, is $750,000 per job, which is far more expensive than any job costs in the private sector.