Mr. Speaker, why is it so rare for a government program to shrink as opposed to grow? I have only been here a short while. I am tender in my years. Some would say that I am chronologically challenged. However, having been here for as long as I have, I have noticed that things rarely tend to shrink around this place. They generally tend to get bigger as opposed to getting smaller. That is exactly the case with the Small Business Loans Act which we are debating today.
I ask myself why that is. I look at the department which I critique. It is a $57 billion monster that started off very small, but then grew and grew over time to become the biggest department in government. The Department of Human Resources Development now has a budget of $57 billion. It is the biggest monstrosity of a department there is within the federal government.
We could document this process with other departments, but let us take a curious look at what has happened with the Small Business Loans Act.
First, the government started with the intention that small businesses in Canada are a major job engine and that they should be helped. Everybody agrees that small businesses are a job engine in this country, but let us look at what type of help the government has actually stepped in with, at what benefit its intrusion has provided.
We always ask the question: Who wants it? Do they actually want the help? There are many small business owners in this Chamber. Mr. Speaker, you may be one of them. If we were to ask small businesses what—