Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to Bill C-32, an act to implement certain provisions of the budget that was tabled in the House on February 28, 2000.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to split my time with my colleague from Cumberland—Colchester. He will be taking half of the speaking time.
It is unfortunate there was not more substance in Bill C-32 with more need to implement more of the provisions that should have been identified in the budget that was tabled in the House on February 28. With budgets, government and governance, the Canadian public is looking for something that is not terribly out of the ordinary and it is not something that is terribly difficult to understand. It seems the government has not had the opportunity to talk to the people in places where they have a tendency to be, the hockey games, the coffee shops in our constituencies.
If we asked the small business owners and other people working in those businesses, it is not difficult to understand what Canadians want. They simply want to have and to hold a job, to earn a living, to educate their children, to buy a house, to have some luxuries, an automobile, and certainly food on their table. They want to be able to earn dollars and to keep and control the dollars they earn.
Unfortunately the budget does not speak to that. The budget still says that if you are a Canadian and you work and you earn money, then the government is going to take that money away from you, because the government knows full well what is better for you as a Canadian citizen and how those dollars should be expended and spent on your behalf. The budget says please do not think that you as a thinking Canadian who can raise that family, keep that job and earn that dollar, know better how to spend those dollars. The government does not believe Canadians are capable of doing that. That philosophy is embraced in the budget that was tabled in the House on February 28. I will speak to that in certain areas.
Also a budget is not simply a financial blueprint; it is a blueprint for the way our society and our country is to grow. It is called vision. I know that word is sometimes overused but certainly it has not gotten through to the members on the government side of the House. They have absolutely no vision. It was mentioned earlier by the hon. member who just spoke that there was a tinkering in the way they do business. It is true.
I use the term caretaker government. It is a caretaker government with a caretaker prime minister who is simply waiting out his days. He is saying that we should do business the way we have always done business, not rock the boat or do anything new and innovative.
However we live in a new and innovative society. We do not live in the 1950s any longer like perhaps the Canadian Alliance would like us to do. We live in a world now which demands that we compete in a globalized world. It demands that our children be educated to a level and standard that they can compete with other nations in the world, not just simply with provinces or the cities adjacent to them.
The government does not recognize that. It has no vision. It has no vision on education. It has no vision on agriculture. We have talked about that. The budget does not speak a word about agriculture. Agriculture, the food on our tables that we eat, is important to Canadian citizens. People who have families, who have jobs and want to educate their children like to put food on their tables, and that comes from agriculture.
The government has absolutely no understanding or idea where the agricultural sector of society is going. There is no vision. The government puts out false hopes, false statements and false programs. Yet the dollars do not get to where they are supposed to go. My constituents have a real feeling of depression because they do not know what kind of future they have.
Let us talk about the lack of vision in health care. The government stands in the House, pats itself on the back and says that it put $2.5 billion into health care in the last budget over four years. The $2.5 billion do not bring us back to a 1993-94 level of expenditure.
Two things are wrong with that. It is not simply the money. It is the vision with respect to health care. The government will not even sit down to work with the provinces, let alone listen to the way it could possibly change the system for the better. It is not prepared to do that because it has no vision and no understanding of where Canadians want to go with that aspect of their lives.
The government has no vision on transportation. Our country was built on transportation, by the rail links, by air and by road. The government does not even know where it is heading with transportation.
Let us talk about Bill C-32 specifically. I mentioned the lack of vision. The government has tried to deal with a couple of areas. One of them was the basic personal deduction. Canadians want to keep their money so they can spend it the best way they see fit. One way to do that is for the government to take less.
It is the Progressive Conservative position that we should have basic personal deductions of $12,000 per year. That is not much money in today's society but it would be a step in the right direction. However the government takes great pride in increasing it by about $100 so that under this government Canadian citizens are not given the right to spend their own money.
Let us talk about CHST. It is not simply a matter of the health dollars that are being transferred. As I said earlier, the health dollars are abysmal. The government should be held accountable for what it did to our health care system. The Prime Minister will be known in history as the man who destroyed our health care system. He did it almost single-handedly, although his backbenchers and his government gave him full rein to do so. They too will have to wear that in history.
What would we do with health care? We would do something that is really foreign to the government, co-operative federalism. It used to be that 50% of health care dollars were contributed by the federal government. That has been reduced. In fact there is a provincial government now that is suggesting it could be as low as 11 cents or 11% of health care dollars.