Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for St. Albert is the Treasury Board critic and I thank him for his presentation.
Since I have entered this House I have been disappointed with members on all sides when they say things just for the sake of saying them without any substance. I have had many discussions with the member for St. Albert. He is a fiscal manager. I wonder how he would do some of the things that are being done at Treasury Board.
I will refer to a couple of things that the member spoke about. He spoke about appropriations. We have this form as members of Parliament. The Treasury Board brought that in awhile ago because members had a way of rushing out and spending a whole lot of money at the end of the year.
Whenever projects are started they do not begin and end at a fiscal time. We are trying to be innovative. We are trying to get government right. There is no way we are not going to have value for dollar. That is the reason that there are appropriations.
The member talked about NavCan. He said these people still have their jobs after we said we would get rid of jobs. I ask him what he would rather do. This department is so important that it is an essential service. It has to do with people coming into the country in aircraft. Even when they are problems with labour, they cannot strike because it becomes very dangerous. During strikes they have to be there in case there are emergencies. There are a lot of emergencies in the air with aircraft flying over a country with military operations and so on. So NavCan is extremely important.
It was a great negotiated policy of the government. It has been moved out of the government to an agency that is going to do a better job. The hon. member said that small business could do a good job.
He said that we brought in measures in the legislation on which we will not negotiate. I want to say to the member that we absolutely want to negotiate. However, we certainly do not want a final arbitrator which will take the monetary commitment away from this legislative body.
We are being fiscally responsible. If he were in our place he certainly would not want to bring someone in from left field to make a wage settlement which the Government of Canada would have no alternative but to accept.