Mr. Speaker, I want to talk to the amendment to the motion this morning. Specifically I want to talk about the millennium fund and some of the misunderstanding of Liberals about post-secondary education, which I am reasonably well qualified to discuss in the House.
I get a bit disturbed, as I usually do, when I listen to members opposite talk about their own legislation. Virtually each time they do so, they talk about the other parties rather than their own legislation.
Before I get into that aspect of it, I am splitting my time with the hon. member for South Surrey—White Rock—Langley. That gives the folks over there a little less time to talk to me.
It is no longer enough for the government to table legislation in the House and then defend the legislation by talking about the opposition parties. It is more appropriate to defend the legislation. I might add that the sooner some members realize this, the sooner they will become better debaters in the House.
I want to talk a bit about values when it comes to the amendment to the motion which actually criticizes the government for failing to follow generally accepted accounting principles from which it declares deficits, surpluses or a zero balance as it is called.
The values in that come from many places. I remember some of the values my mother gave me. They were such things as do not lie, pay as you go, and live within your means. Those are values in my case that came from the maritimes. Those are values that should exist throughout the House. I find them sadly lacking when it comes to some of the submissions made by the other side, the Liberal government in particular.
We can look at the values that come from Rotary International, of which I am a member. Is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? There are other significant tests of values. One has to wonder, when the government does what it did with this millennium fund, where those values come from.
Throughout discussions about the budget in the House I go back to the people at home who have certain expectations. They have children in school, in post-secondary education, for which they are paying a considerable amount of money. These young people are taking out student loans. I have two children in post-secondary institutions, one with a significant student loan.
When we look at those kind of issues and the people back home, issues like getting jobs for these young people, we really have to wonder where this government comes from.
We have the millennium fund. I will describe some of the flaws in it in a moment, but I have to ask whether it was just one huge PR exercise or really an attempt to help the vast majority of students in this country.
For those people who do not know, there is a difference in this land between a scholarship and a bursary. I actually had the pleasure in my community of establishing a scholarship bursary foundation fund which carries in it well over a $1 million today. The difference is this. A scholarship in this land is basically an award given to a young person on the basis of their GPA, their grade point average, or their academic credentials. It has little regard for the financial need of the student. Whereas a bursary is based on financial need.
The government is about to award students with a scholarship based on their grade point average. There is nothing wrong with that, in totality, at times. However, the government has totally ignored the needs of financially impaired students. I can assure members, having been in an educational organization at one time in my life, that those with the highest GPA in school districts end up getting awards, basically from their communities. They do rather well at that. It would have been much better if the government had helped the students who do not have the financial capability to even get into university, much less proceed through university.
This government announced that there was a $2 billion to $3 billion scholarship millennium fund. At the same time it suggested that it had balanced the books. We are going to go through this academic exercise of balancing the books for the next three years. The government will say “Look folks, we balanced the books”. But there is a big difference that the folks back home do not seem to understand about this government. Balancing the books means zero. If this government ends up toward the end of the year with a $3 billion, $5 billion or $7 billion surplus, all it has to do is spend that $3 billion or $5 billion or $7 billion on whatever exercise it wants and stand up at the end of the year and say “We balanced the books”.