Mr. Speaker, I am not sure if I heard a question in there but I think I have a general idea of where the member was going.
I do believe infrastructure is very important. I did not say it is not important. It is one of the first areas we should spend the Canadian tax dollars we collect but it is when you spend it and how you spend it. It is an admission of failure by the three levels of government when all of a sudden because the federal government announces a plan they say that they have bridges to fix and roads to pave. For example, the mayor of Ottawa wants as much as she can get out of this infrastructure to build a hotel here. That is not what infrastructure money is for. It is more in the private sector.
The same for Calgary when they spent $9 million on the Saddledome. That was not what the infrastructure should have been for. That should have been done by private sector. What happened to the private sector? What happened to the risk reward relationship? As politicians if we get embedded with the private sector there is going to become a conflict of interest. They are not going to be able to say no. Which companies do you help? Then the marketplace is distorted.
The $800 million plan for the Canada foundation of the Network of Centres of Excellence is a good way to spend that expenditure money. It will be spread out over time, it will not all be in the 1997 budget but yet it is included in here. That is why I say it is against generally accepted accounting principles. Unless there are signed agreements with everybody on the $800 million, and I hope there is and I am sure the auditor general will let us know whether there is or not. Fudging deficit numbers just for the sake of the deficit is creating an illusion that we have money to spend. We do not. A deficit is a minus, albeit a $19 billion minus is a lot less than a $42 billion minus and it is a big improvement.
I compliment the government for reducing the deficit but I criticize the government and give it an F for not doing it sooner and faster when it knows the real problem is the debt. The finance minister gets an F because his rhetoric does not match the reality. The reality is that he took $7.5 billion from the poor for education and hospitals.
Look at what Ontario finance minister Ernie Eaves said. He said "they took away $2 billion and now they are going to give us back $200 million". He is mistaken if he thinks that $200 million that this government is giving back, both for infrastructure and on the social services, is coming soon and without strings attached, without rules as to how he has to spend that money. This fight is not over. He said he wants to help the disabled, the students and he lays out a big program but it is spread out over three years. Two-thirds of the money if not more is after the next election.
The biggest scam of all and the one I am going to predict right now is the one which will happen in the next federal election to be called for June. After the election has been called for June and after we hit the year ending March 1997 we will have a projected $19 billion deficit. It is not a $19 billion deficit. He knows it is not a $19 billion deficit. He could have said that as of today it is only $17 billion but he is not going to. He is actually going to announce a $16 billion deficit. He can now do a tax relief and he can promise this and that.
This finance minister gets an F for not matching the rhetoric with the reality.