Mr. Speaker, that gives me carte blanche, does it not? What do I think of the way the government does accounting? I think it does not do it right. It is disobeying the rules.
In fact, the auditor general has said as much. It is not permitted under the rules to charge expenditures from one year's budget to different years' budgets. The government is doing this continuously. According to its numbers it has put $11.5 billion into health care. That is the number its spin doctors like to put out.
If we look at the details, we see this one time payment of $3.5 billion being available to the provinces any time they want it. When most ordinary thinking Canadians hear that they think it is $11.5 billion plus $3.5 billion because that is the way it is communicated.
It is not explicit so I checked it out. The accounting methods are totally unacceptable. In the 1999 budget the government charged $3.5 billion against the 1998 budget even though it was already past. That is not acceptable. It cannot backload expenses. No business can do it. The government should not be able to do it. Then it forward loaded expenses like the millennium fund, about which I have already spoken.
Just to finish off on health care, if we look at what the government has put into the budget it is $2 billion a year on health care. That means $2 billion this year and $2 billion next year. That adds up to $4 billion, but the way it is being done is that the $3.5 billion comes out of that. It is not an extra amount at all. I have checked this out because I did not understand it. At a committee meeting I explicitly asked the officials to explain this to me.
It is also clear after we read the documents for the fifth time. We can finally understand that this is what the government is really saying. There is zero more in the budget. Next year there will be half a billion dollars more for health care. After that the government is talking about $2.5 billion and $2.5 billion and $2.5 billion. Most of us would think that is an increase of $2.5 billion every year. Wrong. It is an increase of $2.5 billion from what it was before the first five year plan started.
The government is taking an amount and milking it for all it can. Everyone thinks it is a big amount because the government is announcing the same amount over and over, but it is actually one amount being announced five times. I think that is dishonest, if I dare say that. It is communicating to Canadian taxpayers, to the citizens of this country, our voters, the people who want to put their trust in this parliament—