Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to enter the debate on the budget implementation act. I commend my colleague from Red Deer on his response to that ridiculous question from the Liberal member opposite. He pointed out that the Canada pension plan is flawed.
One of the reasons I got involved in politics was that I resented the Liberal way of mortgaging the present on the future, making future generations pay for its excesses in the present. That is irresponsible and morally corrupt. On behalf of my children and all other children in Canada, I got involved in politics so that we could stop that type of destructive, irresponsible behaviour by the government.
There are three parts of the budget implementation act I would like to specifically address. One is the portion of the act that amends the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act to implement a $2.5 billion increase in the Canada health and social transfer over four years.
The fact of the matter is that transfers from the federal government to the provinces were $18.5 billion per year when the Liberals came to power in 1993. They were reduced to $11.5 billion and now they have been increased to somewhere in the neighbourhood of $14 billion, still about $4.5 billion a year short of the funding that was in place six and a half years ago.
It is worthwhile to note that if we add up the cost to the health care system over the years of Liberal government there has actually been a shortfall or deficiency of $25 billion compared to the funding levels we had in 1993. That does not even account for inflation or population growth.
Health care has been terribly underfunded by the government in favour of spending the money on wasteful government programs and not in favour of tax cuts. The billion dollar boondoggle in the human resources department, the misappropriation or misallocation of grant money, is a good illustration of irresponsible behaviour and skewed priorities where the Liberals refuse to fund social programs that Canadians care about, such as our health care system, in favour of handing money to their political friends. That is tax money, I might add, paid by hard working Canadian families.
I would also like to address the amendment to the Excise Tax Act to allow the Minister of National Revenue to obtain judicial authorization to immediately assess and take action to collect from a person GST-HST deemed remittable by the minister. Suffice to say, I am opposed to that because it broadens the already coercive tax power of the government by granting even further powers to the Minister of National Revenue. When the Canadian Alliance forms the government we will be looking at measures to protect taxpayers and at having fairer methods of assessment and collection instead of a heavy handed, uncaring and unfeeling Liberal minister.
The Income Tax Act will be amended as of January 1 of this year to reinstate full indexation of the tax code. That is a move we have been urging the government to take ever since it took power in 1993 because of the insidious, sneaky way our taxes were going up year by year as a result of bracket creep. Tax brackets and personal deductions were not indexed to inflation.
Although the government has finally corrected this and finally listened to us after six years, it did not do so in any retroactive fashion. In order to reintroduce indexation it should have calculated the loss to taxpayers over the years by the fact that there was no indexation and then implement provisions whereby taxpayers would be able to receive the benefit of that.
There are numerous parts of the budget which I want to address, but in consideration of some of the debate which took place earlier in the day I will start by covering a brief history to where we are now.
I am referring in particular to a speech made by a Progressive Conservative member. It might have been the House leader. He was trying to justify the massive increase in our national debt that occurred during the Mulroney government, the nine year reign of error by the Conservatives. He was addressing the deficit which grew to enormous levels under their leadership.
When the Conservatives came to power in 1984 the national debt stood somewhere around the $200 billion mark. It was increasing as a result of deficit budgets by the previous Liberal government. The Tories at that time were in a unique position to reverse that trend and bring responsible fiscal management to government. They could have eliminated the deficit very quickly and very easily and began paying down the $200 billion debt. Instead, they embarked on the largest expansion of government in the history of our country.
Over a nine year period they increased taxes 71 times, but government spending far outpaced their tax increases to the point that annual deficits, by the time they left power nine years later, were over $40 billion a year. They added $300 billion to our national debt, more than doubling it. The fact that party is now on the brink of elimination is fitting, considering the fiscal mess it left our country in.
At this point I will discuss the legislative agenda of the Liberal government. The budget implementation act is full of flaws which we are illustrating for the benefit of the House. I want to put that in the context of the legislative agenda of the government. Not only is the budget deficient in many ways, but instead of addressing the areas of concern the government is on a very hollow agenda which lacks vision and is irresponsible.
I am referring to the fact that two days ago we debated in the House an act to extend marital benefits to gay couples. We have a $600 billion national debt. We have unreasonable levels of taxation. Yet the government is preoccupied with redefining marriage.
We have pressured the government for the last six years to reform the Young Offenders Act, to introduce a victims bill of rights into our criminal justice system and to address the problems in our prisons and the problems with parole. Many reforms are needed to the justice system and there was no response from the government.
Another illustration of its lack of vision and lack of responsibility is the child pornography issue. The government refuses to act. Last June the official opposition put forward a supply day motion on that topic urging the government to intervene, invoke the notwithstanding clause and enforce the law which made child pornography illegal, but it refused to do so.
The HRDC billion dollar boondoggle is very telling. We have a taxation system that is in dire need of repair and reform. The government in the budget has increased funding to HRDC. We are going to see more grants, more patronage, more suspicious payoffs and transactions.
I will illustrate a few examples. It is my understanding that the president of the Liberal constituency association in the riding of the minister of Indian affairs received a grant of about $150,000, which actually exceeded the legal limit of grants under the program from which he received it. Not only was there a patronage payoff for his political activity on behalf of the Liberal Party, but under the grant program that it used to administer the patronage payoff the law was even broken with respect to that.