Mr. Speaker, he had his opportunity to speak. Now he is heckling me, trying to throw me off track when I am trying to drive home the message to the viewing public that there are fallacies contained in his prepared speech that probably came out of the minister's office or the Prime Minister's office and was handed to him a few minutes before he walked into the Chamber.
He stood and read it. If he really wants to debate the millennium fund and how much support it has, then why do we not have a debate about that instead of him standing and reading a prepared speech?
The fact is that the millennium fund is going to be a disgrace. It is going to be a failure. Why? The reason is simple. We pointed it out during the budget debate. I am sure the pages watching this debate today will be interested in this because, once again, what we see is that the Liberal government wants to differentiate between Canadians. It wants to set up two classes, just as it has on the hepatitis C issue. It wants to have two classes of victims. It will compensate some of the people. The government says it is a caring government, that it will compensate the post-1986 victims. The ones between 1986 and 1990 will be compensated, but the ones before will not be compensated.
The hon. member across the way who just spoke was bragging about how the millennium fund will help 100,000 students. Is that not great? But the fact of the matter is that there 1.6 million post-secondary students: 400,000 are full time students and the rest are part time students. Do the math. The students are doing the math: 100,000 out of 400,000.
Once again this Liberal government wants to differentiate. Which will be the lucky quarter of the full time students who will get the scholarships? The government will decide which of those young students will get the scholarships. If they belong to the Young Liberals of Canada they might get a scholarship. Somehow the government is going to differentiate and decide who gets the scholarships.
That is not totally true. The hon. member who spoke before me said that there is going to be one student on the board. I am sure the government can find one Liberal student, but after this maybe not.
The fact is, there is no budget surplus to help Canadians in a unified way because of the false accounting practices of this government. That is the fact. This millennium fund is the latest example of that. The finance minister has put $2.5 billion into the 1998 budget. He has built it in, but he has not spent the money yet. The money will be spent down the road.
The auditor general on March 18 responded to a threatening letter from finance officials by saying “I believe the change will open the door for governments to influence reporting results by simply announcing intentions in their budgets and then deciding what to include in the deficit or surplus after the end of the year once preliminary numbers are known”.
The facts are very clear. The government is trying to separate students. It is trying to pit student against student. Very clearly during the last election campaign, and we are nearing the first anniversary of this new government since the June 2 election a year ago, we laid out our plan on how we would help all students. We did not hear anything back then about a millennium fund. This is something that the government has come up with to pit student against student. It will help a quarter of them. What about the other three-quarters who are seeing tuition costs rising?
The fact is, these students cannot afford huge increases in the cost of obtaining their education. The Liberal government with its millennium fund is effectively bringing down a subsidy for people like Bill Gates because of the huge brain drain of our brightest young students. They get their education here and end up going to work for companies like Microsoft. The richest man in the world is getting a subsidy courtesy of the Liberal government because it has refused to address fundamental issues like high taxes that drive our young people away from our country to seek employment in the United States where taxes are more reasonable.
That is a fundamental issue that this government is not addressing and the government refuses to address it.