What about Kim? Kim was certainly defeated. She managed to do a real good job of being defeated, and there she is off in Beverly Hills.
These appointments conjure up something in our minds.
We look at the Senate and we see a bunch of party hacks working on campaigns, raising funds for the party. We ask ourselves, what about corruption? What about democracy? Again we have problems.
The Parliament Buildings were supposed to cost under half a billion dollars. Now it is $1.4 billion. What do Canadians think about that? In planet Ottawa maybe those things are fine, but out on the street it is not so fine, it is not so happy. We have to address these kinds of things.
We could talk about what people think about the social union. People think that their health care is hurt, that their education systems are not as good as they were and that the social policies are not working. They have food banks, housing problems and all kinds of other problems. They ask “What is government doing about it?”
Government is cutting funding. Health care has been cut by $7 billion in the last five years. Again I come back to the fact that there is no plan. The government does not know where it is going. It has no master plan.
Does the government know what it is going to do in agriculture? Certainly other places in the world are looking at it. Why would agreements be signed when other places like the European Union or the U.S. are giving grants to everybody? Why did we not negotiate a better deal? What is wrong with the people who allowed us get into a situation like that?
I will talk about the policing problem. In my area the police showed up at a rotary meeting begging the Rotary Club to help provide a motorcycle because motorcycles are more efficient at catching speeders and people going through red lights. Why were they at the Rotary Club? Because the government has cut their funding. In the past month they were told not to use their cellphones any more and to put two cars in the garage. They could not use them because of funding cuts. Meanwhile we have young offenders, break-ins and all kinds of other problems happening.
What is happening to our system?
We can talk about the pension plan and the 73% increase in the cost of the plan. Talk to a young person and ask them about investment in the pension plan. If they are 20 or 25 years old and they put 9.9% of their income in until they are 65, ask them what kind of an investment that is.
I did a little survey last January. It was very interesting. I think the House might be interested in this survey. It was to go door to door in Chile, a country that has had a pension plan for 26 years. It is a private pension plan. They invest in their own pension. They own the pension plan themselves. I found an overwhelming pride among the low, middle and upper class of income earners. There was a real pride in that pension plan because it meant something.
How about employment insurance? People certainly question that the government is collecting $350 per person more than it can use. It is also collecting $500 per business per worker. And we are going to give back 15 cents per $100. Are we not just wonderful?
People ask “What is happening down there? Is that place corrupt?” Ask people what they think about Ottawa and they will bring up these kinds of items. They will not necessarily talk about the big international deals. They will talk about health care, taxes, pensions, education, the systems that touch people. That is what they care about.
While we agree in principle with this bill, the way it has been brought in is disgraceful. The Liberals should be ashamed of themselves for bringing it in this way. They should be ashamed of bringing it in through the Senate. They should be ashamed for not allowing the time that a bill like this one needs and for simply running it through at this eleventh hour.
Basically as we look at it, we are against corruption. This is a real motherhood issue. But there are questions businesses would like to have answered.
In principle we can go along with this bill, but we certainly have a lot of questions. And we certainly tell the government that we do not like the method by which it brought in this bill.