Mr. Speaker, I will continue, but just because the decorum in this House gets down to the bottom of the trough does not mean that members have to participate or support it. Hon. members can actually try to show some decorum in this House, Mr. Speaker.
I want to talk about the $50 billion that is frustrating Canadians. What is frustrating Canadians is the lack of accountability and how the government spends money and the tax increases that have been forced upon them. There has been one hidden tax increase after another. It is the taxpayers who actually got the deficit to zero. It was not the government. It is the sneaky, hidden tax increases that have frustrated Canadians across the country.
In the last year in the House of Commons we have started to see the real skeletons of the Liberal Party of Canada come out of the closet. How the Liberals spend money is being exposed. We have seen billions of dollars go out to friends and contributors of the Liberal Party of Canada. There is absolutely overwhelming evidence. It is all documented. It has been revealed in the House that people who have received significant grants, most important, in the Prime Minister's own riding, and what have they done? They have turned around and donated part of that grant money straight back into the Liberal Party. If this happened in the private sector it would be called fraud, it would be called criminal, it would be called corruption and the people would be thrown in jail, nothing less.
Let me show the arrogance of all this. Day after day we watch the government members not try to correct it, laugh at it, make fun of it and ridicule it. They are not laughing at us. Yes, we can see them, but they are looking into the cameras behind me. They are looking to the Canadian people. They are making a mockery of the whole system. They are laughing at the Canadian people as these grants happen day after day in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The grants and contributions are ridiculous.
This has caused an incredible burning passion in the Canadians I speak to no matter where I go, whether it is in western Canada, in Atlantic Canada, in Ontario or in Quebec. It happens everywhere. People are very frustrated. We have to change that and that is why we will be voting against this bill, the $50 billion.
In the February budget that the finance minister brought in, the government increased the grants and contributions in the fiscal year 1999-2000 by $1.5 billion. That is how much money is in its own government documents for grants and contributions but health care supposedly only receive $1 billion. It is absolutely unacceptable.
It is time to bring in accountability. We have to depoliticize the process. These grants and contributions are going out to people who are personal friends of the Prime Minister and who, as we have heard day in and day out in the House, have absolutely incredible histories.
What I want to emphasize is that the Canadian people are looking to us to bring some respect, integrity and honesty back to this institution so that they will get value for their taxpayer dollars. People want to see a truly national health care system, whether they get sick in Newfoundland, in Winnipeg or in my home province of British Columbia, that they know they are going to be treated and that they are not going to have to die on waiting lists. Our health care system is an absolute state of chaos right now.
This is happening in my own riding. In Sidney where I live, and in the greater Victoria area, they have had to make changes. They have had to close down health facilities that have been there for a long time. They have had to close the intensive care unit for children level 2 at one of the only two children's pediatric centres in British Columbia. When I asked the CEO at the Victoria Regional Health Board why that was happening, he said that it started because of one reason, no money and the lack of funds. Those critically ill children will now have to be airlifted to Vancouver.
This is happening over and over again. The frustrating part is that it does not need to be that way.
The Liberals stand up and laugh at the grants going into hotels and golf courses in the Prime Minister's own riding. They make a mockery of it. They think it is a big joke. Well, it is completely unacceptable. It is time to bring change to this institution.
The last government that did this was the Tory government in the early 1990s. The Tories became arrogant and believed that they were above everyone who brought them here. They forgot about the people who voted for them. They put themselves on a pedestal so high that they thought they were untouchable. Well, the Canadian people judged them in October 1993 and they were not re-elected. The Canadian people threw the federal Tories so far that it was not even funny. They took a government with 211 seats, one of the largest majorities in the history of Canada, and brought them down to two seats. Why? It was because the Tories became arrogant, unaccountable and showed no respect for the Canadian taxpayer.
This is happening today but 10 times worse. If Canadians think what happened then was bad, they have not seen anything yet. It is pitiful what has gone on in here.
What is really pitiful is the Liberals' reaction to all this. They stand up and make a mockery of question period. They laugh and make jokes and do not give answers in question period. We heard the Minister of Veterans Affairs, when he stood up in the House in the last two days, just make a big joke about this.
I am happy to talk about anything they want, and we will let the Canadian people judge. They can continue to laugh, make jokes and yell across the House but their day is coming. As we all know, we are less than a year away from an election. We will stand on our record and they can stand on theirs. Their record is a health care system that has disintegrated and is in a state of chaos. We have rising taxes and personal family incomes and disposable incomes have gone down. Frustrated Canadians have watched unaccountable grants go up. That is their record, and they cannot step away from it because there is too much evidence and hard facts.
I look forward to the next federal election when the government will be judged and we will see who gets the last laugh, the taxpayer or the government.