Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise and address the budget implementation act, Bill C-49. I regret to tell the hon. member who just spoke that it does not enjoy the support of the official opposition.
As I have said before in the House, this is the worst budget the finance minister has ever brought down. Frankly, it is a disgrace to see spending rise by 9.3% and to see some other things that have occurred. We had a $6.2 billion planning deficit until this year when the government conveniently changed how the books were kept to avoid the embarrassment of having the deficit exposed by its own documents. These are not just my observations. Others have observed them. I will say more about that in a moment.
The markets have passed judgment on the budget. We saw this in the precipitous fall of the dollar in the last several weeks. The decline has been absolutely amazing despite the amateurish efforts of the government to talk up the dollar, as if anyone could talk up the dollar on a permanent basis. It can only be done in the short run.
The government is confused. We have seen that in the events of the last couple of days. The government is talking about changing the infrastructure program it proposed from an arm's length program into one run by the Deputy Prime Minister and subject to the caprices and whims of a politician. At bottom that is what the Deputy Prime Minister is. Being a politician he is always tempted to use government money for his own political ends. It is a dangerous situation and we need to be wary of it.
We saw the government propose another accounting trick in the budget where it would take $500 million and put it into a trust. This is what it did with the Africa Fund. The finance minister today said no, that would not happen. He said the money would go into debt retirement. The government has been stung by the accusation that it has not retired debt this year. Even $500 million is a pittance when we have a debt of $547 billion. It would take hundreds of years to pay down the debt if we proceeded at a pace of just $500 million a year.
The budget is a disgrace for other reasons. At a time when the whole world has been rocked by the events of September 11 and when the first role of government must always be to protect its citizens, it is an absolute disgrace that so little emphasis in the budget was put on protecting the public. I will talk in greater detail about that in a moment.
It has been revealed that the government has made a $3.3 billion accounting error à la Enron in the last couple of weeks. This points to how money seems to flow through the fingers of the government like water. It calls into question whether the government has done an adequate job of scrutinizing all it does to find waste and mismanagement. I would argue it has not. I will say more about that in a moment.
To sum up, this has been a terrible budget. It does not do the finance minister any credit. The finance minister has won plaudits even from the opposition for some though not all of the things he has done. However he blew his reputation completely with this budget.
I will offer as evidence some newspaper commentary we saw in the wake of the budget. Here is one from the Montreal Gazette . Commenting that the finance minister “spends like Santa”, it says:
As the first budget in 22 months, it was unforgivably tardy. As a security and military spending boost, it was undeniably tepid.
Here is another from the Montreal Gazette . It quotes Jack Mintz, president of the C.D. Howe Institute and one of the most trusted economists in the country. He called the infrastructure foundation “the Liberal Leadership Candidates' Strategic Slush Fund”, noting it could be used for anything that fits under a broad description.
Here is what TD Canada Trust had to say about the budget:
--under the older planning framework, the government would be targeting a deficit in the order of $5.5 billion for fiscal 2002-03.
Here is an editorial from the Ottawa Sun :
This budget demonstrates marvelously that the biggest threat to the nation's finances isn't recession or terrorism, it's this government's abject refusal to embrace a policy of spending restraint, especially during tough economic times.
Andrew Coyne's headline in the National Post calls it:
A reckless, dishonest, two-year con job: Budget casts aside undeserved cloak of fiscal responsibility.
Here is what Terence Corcoran of the National Post had to say about the budget of December:
--Paul Martin reiterated his commitment to the contingency reserve as an annual $3-billion pool that would be used to cover forecasting risks and other economic errors. “It is not a source of funding for new policy initiatives. If not needed, it will be used to pay down the public debt.” Yesterday, Mr. Martin rewrote the rules.
Walter Robinson of the Canadian Taxpayer's Federation said:
Minister Martin has once again refused to institute a schedule of legislated debt reduction...and thereby, continues the fiscal crime of intergenerational tax evasion perpetuated against our children--
I offer these quotes as evidence of my assertion that this is the worst budget the minister has ever brought down.
I will say a few things about what the budget did not do. It did not inspire confidence in the ailing dollar. The fall in the dollar since the budget came down is evidence of that. It has done nothing and will do nothing to improve our productivity. That can only happen when the government withdraws to some degree from the economy, is less intrusive, lowers taxes and provides some kind of economic vision for the future. That has not happened.
As a result the budget has done nothing to offer new job opportunities at a time when unemployment is rising. Surely to goodness the government should be concerned about that but it was not reflected in the budget. The budget has done nothing to offer new opportunities for investment in Canada, something which is completely linked to the concept of productivity.
In short, there is no vision to help Canada reach its incredible potential as a nation. The government did not rebalance its spending. In the wake of September 11 that is shocking. In not doing so the government is almost guilty of gross neglect.
For every year in the $170 billion budget a spending envelope of about $15 billion would go to grants and subsidies. I will not say the entire $15 billion consists of things that can be cut out of government without harming people. However billions of dollars in the envelope are examples of unnecessary and low priority spending.
Grants to artists and regional development grants have been shown over and over again to distort the economy and hurt businesses that are making it on their own. They are always subject to politics. We have often revealed in the House how the government rewards its political friends by handing out grants and subsidies so liberally. I say that both figuratively and literally.
In not addressing the $15 billion envelope of grants and subsidies the government did not find new money without raising taxes that could have been used to help it fulfill the most important role of any government. What is the primary role of government? It is to uphold the law. No society can long survive unless there is a government that consistently upholds the law.
In order to do that we would need a strong criminal justice system. We would need the police to enforce it. We would need good controls on our borders and on immigration. We would also need a strong national defence and a strong intelligence arm.
However the record of the government is to take what is the core business of government and chop it to the bone while it expands spending in all other areas that really are slush funds, in my judgment, and money the government uses to help it win elections.
The result is that organizations like CSIS, which is our intelligence arm in helping to protect the Canadian public, has been slashed to the bone. Previous to this budget, the government introduced cuts to CSIS of about 28%, and even with the money it put back into CSIS, we are still at 1993 funding levels in inflation adjusted dollars.
CSIS, an organization that has been charged with finding out if there are terrorists or criminal elements trying to get into the country, if they are active in the country, what they are doing, how active they are and if they are infiltrating government, for instance, has been cut to the bone under the leadership of the Liberal government.
The government should be roundly criticized for that because when it does something like that it puts public security at risk. We have seen many examples in the last several months of terrorists who were allowed into the country, in some cases being sought by international authorities in connection with the efforts of al-Qaeda and perhaps even in connection with what happened on September 11. That is disgraceful and we should not be allowing it.
It is not to say that could never happen, even with a fully funded organization, but obviously the government has to put more priority on it. The same applies to immigration. We pointed to problems over and over again in the House. We think immigration is positive and it is a good thing but it does not mean that we just let everybody in. There should be some scrutiny at the borders but that does not require a bunch of new laws, laws like the government gave to itself in the wake of September 11 that allow it to do all kinds of things without consulting parliament, things that are contrary to our common law tradition, where the government can arrest people for 72 hours without allowing them to access a lawyer and without pressing charges.
We really need more officials at the border to handle all the cases we have but we do not have that. It is well know that there are many thousands of people who have been allowed into Canada as refugees and were subsequently turned down but we have no idea if they actually left the country.
Why were they turned down? They were suspected, in many cases, of being a security risk. We have no idea whether they left the country. There are some estimates that as many as 27,000 of those people may be running loose in Canada. Rather obviously, that should be a huge concern of the government but the government has always shortchanged security even though it is the primary role that any government should play.
It was a few years ago that the Canadian Alliance pointed out in the House that the RCMP in British Columbia did not have enough money to put new tires on its cars. It did not have enough money to put fuel in its boats and planes, and to do drug interdiction on the west coast. It was an absolute disgrace.
The primary role of government is to set the laws and enforce them because no country or society can exist without that. However the government had no money for that while it spent billions upon billions for discretionary spending on all kinds of crazy things. That was a disgrace.
We are now trying to play catch up, but it really is an indictment of the government that it made it such a low priority for so many years. Over the last couple of days we have had examples of how the government has failed our customs officials who are the first line of defence when people come into Canada.
When people enter the country the first people they meet are our customs officials. Customs officials must uphold dozens and dozens of statutes in Canada. We have heard stories of how customs officers, who are not armed by the way, have been so afraid of some of the people they are dealing with at the border that they have actually allowed them into the country because they themselves were not armed and feared that the person on the other side of the window was. We have heard from customs officials themselves that this has occurred.
We are arguing that the government has done a terrible job of looking after our customs officials to make sure they are adequately protected and can make sure that these people who are suspected of criminal activity or even terrorist activity not be allowed into the country or in fact arrested.
It was revealed the other day that customs officials at Pearson airport do not have any protective gear. They do not have pepper spray, batons or flak jackets. However we understand that immigration officials have been issued those things. Is that not a little ironic? The customs officials are the first ones to deal with new arrivals into Canada but they are not given those things. It is only after these people have been pulled aside by the customs officials that they are handed over to the immigration officials.
We asked the Deputy Prime Minister about that yesterday and he was quite confused about it all. He did not know that it was happening. We have it on good authority that it is happening. We want the government to start taking the security of Canada seriously, something that was simply not reflected in the budget.
I find it ironic that in the last number of days there have been a lot of concerns coming from the Liberal backbenches and actually even from former cabinet ministers, like Lloyd Axworthy, about sovereignty in the wake of what happened on September 11 and in the wake of discussions about co-operating more fully with our allies, especially the United States, on security measures, for instance. The reason this is very ironic is because the same people who have repeatedly voted against increasing funding for Canada's military, the RCMP and CSIS, are the same people who complain about a threat to our sovereignty by the United States.
They do not worry about the threats to our sovereignty by terrorists or criminals that are caused by a lack of funding for officials who have to greet dangerous people at our borders. However the moment we talk about working in a co-operative way with the United States and exercising our sovereignty by making a decision in the interest of Canada to work with the United States, they rise up on their hind legs and start to scream bloody murder. I think they are guilty of gross hypocrisy.
It does not end there. What do we mean when we talk about sovereignty? I think we mean that if a country is sovereign it has the ability to make decisions that affect its own destiny. What happens in Canada if we as a country make the decision to work co-operatively with the United States on issues that we think will benefit Canada? What if we exercise our sovereignty in that way? Is it offensive to members across the way if we make that decision? We are exercising our sovereignty.
I do not think the issue here is the issue of sovereignty. What members across the way have a problem with is co-operation with the United States of America, which many of them frankly resent. They resent the Americans because they have become so extraordinarily wealthy at a time when our standard of living is falling against that of the United States. They resent them because they are able to put more money into public health care than Canada has with its socialized medical system.
They have become resentful. They mask this resentment with the argument about sovereignty but let us look at it for what it is. It is bitterness and resentment, and it is time it was exposed.
I want to--