Madam Speaker, on behalf of my constituents of Battlefords—Lloydminster I am pleased to speak today to Group No. 1 amendments to Bill C-36, the budget implementation act.
Like the budget itself, the act is full of items that may have good intentions but are badly thought out or whose purpose seems to be to fool Canadians into thinking the government is managing taxpayers' money properly.
As a member of the Standing Committee on Finance, the most glaring example I can see of good intentions gone bad and turning into a political boondoggle is the Prime Minister's millennium scholarship fund.
I am sure the thinking in the Liberal cabinet was: Who could possibly disagree with putting more money in the hands of deserving students? In principle, no one really disagrees.
However, most of the presenters to the finance committee in the past weeks all had problems with sections of this fund, including the student groups themselves.
The Reform Party certainly supports the concept of encouraging these young Canadians to pursue higher education but, in the time honoured tradition of its predecessors, this Liberal government has managed to separate the taxpayer from his money only to offer it back to him as if it were a favour.
After cutting $6 billion from the amount the provinces were expecting to help pay for further education, this finance minister had an embarrassing problem. He had taxed Canadians to the limit and built up a budgetary surplus.
Why he could not bring himself to leave these excess tax dollars in the hands of the people who earned them we will never understand. In any case, he ended up with $2.5 billion to dispose of, to hide from his fellow colleagues as it were.
The finance minister decided to charge his credit card this year and start paying for it two years down the road. The benefit of providing only 7% of Canada's students with $3,000 a year will not even kick in until the year 2000, but the taxpayer gets to foot this bill right away. The auditor general says nobody else could get away with this creative accounting and we certainly agree with that statement.
Our colleagues in the Bloc have been pressing to allow Quebec to opt out altogether and to decide how to dispense its share of the millennium scholarship fund.
I certainly agree in principle since the provinces are responsible for education and this bill states nothing about how to approach the various types of schools that each province has set up to provide a range of education opportunities.
However, in committee we were told that there is no provincial share because this is not a federal program in the legal sense of the word. This is a new breed of animal that commits taxpayers' money to a private foundation. This government sets up an entity with public money but says it does not need the auditor general to look after it.
The board will name its own auditor, state its own salaries, hand out taxpayers' dollars on merit—whatever that might be—or need, or both, ignoring the fact that provinces and the federal government and, for that matter, private industry already have bursaries, loans, grants and award programs in place to help students who demonstrate that merit and need.
Are we going to reward the poorest of the best or the best of the poorest? That is one of the comments we heard at the finance committee the other day. I think it is certainly true.
No wonder this government does not want the millennium scholarship foundation to be subject to the Access to Information Act. It is clearly a political ploy to convince Canadians that the Liberals care about education when what they really care about is filtering tax money through their offices to get credit at election time.
To sum up, the Reform Party wants this government to return to recognized accounting procedures that only book funding in the year that the project actually takes place. We propose the that Auditor General of Canada be named in the act that creates this scholarship fund, that this fund be subject to the Access to Information Act and that an appeal process be specified to deal with applications that are turned down.
Further, we propose that each province and territory be allowed to access scholarship funds based on the system in place and the needs as determined by the governments based on student populations.
If we are to assist the next generation in developing the skills and education they need to build a better Canada we should look first at how we can leave the maximum resources in their hands and then how we can provide them with the most flexible and cost effective ways to support their efforts.