Mr. Speaker, I feel tempted to repeat what I just said and maybe I will as part of my speech.
Before beginning my remarks on Bill C-69 I would like to remind the House that almost two years after the 1993 election the debt and deficit has risen by almost $100 billion. That is just in the two years since the Liberal government took office.
In the past 24 hours the government has spent almost $100 million more than it took in. That is about $4 million per hour or $67,000 per minute in money we simply do not have, money we have to borrow. This borrowed money continues to collect interest that adds to the more than $550 billion debt burden our children and grandchildren will have to carry.
Some weeks ago at a public meeting in Vancouver the Liberal member for Halifax said that as a traditional tax and spend Liberal she had crashed and burned when the Minister of Finance announced his budget in March of this year. If serious action is not taken very soon to seriously start addressing the problem of the debt and deficit, the hon. member is sure going to crash and burn again and again and again. It will be to the point where the international lenders will stop supporting our foolishness.
Today we find ourselves debating again Bill C-69, which exists simply because of Bill C-18, which we debated earlier in 1994. I said then that the Liberal government should be ashamed of itself because of what it was doing. It was imposing the will of unhappy Liberal MPs on the voters of Canada. It was probably because they were worried they would not be re-elected to collect their gold-plated pensions at the pension trough. They were worried that if the boundaries changed they would not be able to collect their pensions.
They have protected the content of those pork barrel pensions with Bill C-85, which they are also ramming through the House this next week or so. Now they have brought back the electoral boundaries issue in a last ditch attempt to control the shape of their ridings. Without regard to the huge investment of time by the Electoral Boundaries Commission and without regard to the millions of dollars that have already been spent on a non-partisan process, the government is still trying to jam through ill-conceived and selfish political agendas.
Politicians have no business setting their own electoral boundaries. Human nature being what it is, some members might be tempted to act in their own interests, to trim areas of opposition from their ridings or to add little areas of support to their ridings. Even if that did not happen, there would be the suspicion of course that it was happening.
The important thing is that the whole process should not only be non-partisan but it should be seen to be non-partisan. Politicians should have absolutely nothing to do with the process.
One of the disturbing parts about this whole process is that the increase in population in the province of B.C. entitles us to two more seats in the House under the present rules. Even if we were to hold static the number of seats we presently have, at the very least they should be redistributed so that B.C. has a greater proportion of the seats.
I vigorously oppose Bill C-69.