Mr. Speaker, I rise to address Bill C-36, otherwise known as the Canadian millennium scholarship foundation.
I would like everybody to realize one thing. This scholarship supposedly is about education. I have great difficulty in believing that. I do not think this is about education at all. I believe that it is actually the Prime Minister using taxpayers' hard earned money in order to boost his own ego, so to speak. And just to add insult to injury, we have only to look at the announcement he made to appoint the chair of the foundation prior to this legislation's even being introduced to this House.
That to me goes a long way in saying exactly what this is all about. They have talked time and time again of the great effort they have put into addressing the budget in order to bring this new found money into the education fund.
Number one, it was not this government that balanced the budget. It was the Canadian taxpayers, the hard working taxpayers in Canada who sacrificed a lot to see this happen. A lot of them suffered time lost from their families, something that money cannot compensate.
I see the arrogance of this government when it says that it balanced the budget. I question that. It is just not so. We look at what has happened in the last few years. This used to be a society in which only one working person had to go out to make a decent living for the family.
In most cases that is no longer possible. Both parents now have to work in order to survive. It is not for little extras. No, it is to survive in this country which we say is so great.
We have become unpaid slaves to the government in many cases. We have accepted this because we were led for many years to believe the government was looking after us, that the government was taking care of the problems and we would not have to worry.
Gradually through the years taxation crept up. The government said we have to do this in order to pay for this. We bought that. The government said it was good, it would benefit Canadian society. We thought the government was very knowledgeable. We agreed to work a little harder and to pay a little more in taxes.
Along came another issue and the government sold us under the guise that it is good for society, that it will make us better, caring, sharing human beings. We bought this and bought this and bought this.
Now Canadian taxpayers are waking up to one simple fact. Taxpayers definitely are caring and sharing human beings but this government lacks any of that sort of compassion. This government has become a tax addicted parasite on the taxpayers of this country.
We were led to believe that if we worked hard we could contribute to our own type of special retirement plan, that if we were diligent and invested wisely we could retire early and in comfort.
I am sad to say that in Canada this is just about no longer possible. The harder someone works, the more they are taxed. The more they put away to retire, the faster the government figures out how to get in there just like that and take it.
The government takes it no longer with one hand but with both hands, from a person's bank account, their wallet and their wife's purse. It will even take from a child's inheritance in order to say it will help you.
When someone asks for help from this government, they stand in a line. They are lucky if, when they phone, there is anyone on the other end. It often is a machine telling them to dial back later when it is not so busy. That is the caring, sharing feeling of this lousy government.
Let us take a look at this for one moment. The government is saying it will give back $385 million in the scholarship fund. It slashed over $7 billion from education and health but it will give back $385 million.
That is like cutting off a hand to save a finger and then saying we helped you, we fixed you, we made it better, aren't we nice people.
That snow job no longer works in this country. I think this budget came a bit early. It should really have been introduced on April 1. There is no doubt in my mind about that.
Let us look at what is happening in the EI surplus. We have mentioned time and time again what is happening here. This government is taxing employers and employees into poverty. We now know that there is a $13.5 billion surplus in the EI program alone. What does this government do? It says it will give back a few pittance to the employer and the employee. It tells us that because it raised it so high it can now cut back a bit and call it a tax cut.
This is like an armed robber taking $100,000 out of a bank and giving back $10 in the hopes he will not be sentenced. He feels that by giving some back he is not altogether bad. That is not going to wash too long in this country.
The people are starting to wake up. We have received phone call after phone call into all our offices. I do not even believe there is a member across the way, although they may not like to admit it and maybe will not admit it in public, who has not had phone call after phone call every day from people who are just getting by or who are not getting by at all because they are being taxed to death.
When we put that question to the Liberals here in the House, which I did a few days ago, one out of eight or nine I questioned says that in all the time they have been here since 1993 they have received two phone calls. That is hard to believe. In fact, I cannot believe that. I think somebody is fudging.