Mr. Speaker, the Liberal member who spoke before my colleague mentioned a couple of issues related to the budget. One was infrastructure and one was rural Canada becoming wired. I would like comment on a couple of those things.
The problem with the infrastructure programs that the Liberals have instituted in the past is that they have quite often ended up being boondoggles, handouts to friends and to special interest groups. They have not actually contributed to renewal of real infrastructure, like roads and bridges.
I do not disagree with the member that there is a need for some infrastructure investment, but not of the type that was done in the past in the $6 billion infrastructure programs that were introduced in 1994. Everyone knew that was a joke. They were handouts to all sorts of special interest groups. The degree to which I can support the member is; I would say yes, provided we really invest in real infrastructure.
As to rural Canada becoming wired, I think most people in the country would agree that that was a complete waste of money. The private sector was doing very well getting Canadians wired. Frankly, in areas where it was not economic to do so, people were coping by getting onto the Internet over the regular phone lines. This can be done on cell phones and satellite phones so I do not see any reason why taxpayers should have to pour huge amounts of money into that system. It is just ridiculous when the money could have been used in more worthwhile areas.
When I look at the budget as a whole, the finance minister has failed to put a stop to billions of dollars that flow out the door of the treasury every year by discretionary grants and contribution programs. Every year billions of dollars of taxpayer money is handed out by virtually every department of government in discretionary grants programs. It is fairly shocking when we look at where that money goes. I will give some examples of that in just a moment.
It is interesting to note that for three years now there have been generous federal surpluses, but instead of aggressively paying down our national debt, the Liberals use most of the surplus to significantly increase spending for their pet projects. As a result, it is still spending about 25% of the entire budget, $40 billion a year, on interest payments on the debt.
That is totally unacceptable because $40 billion a year could build 200 brand new Lion's Gate Bridges in Vancouver every year for what is being spent on interest payments on our debt. Instead of ramping up the spending to special interest groups, if the government had instead taken an aggressive approach to pay down of the debt, it would have freed up more money to spend on our important programs.
The problem is we have these terrible grants and contribution programs, and I want to give some examples.
The first example would be grants to political friends. The human resources development department has been atrociously handled over the past few years. We know that it wasted billions of dollars. It keeps sinking money into businesses that go bankrupt. The latest one is that more than $618,000 that was sunk into Celebrity Boats Corporation in the Prime Minister's riding before it went bankrupt.
Taxpayers have also backed loans to Air Wisconsin, Northwest Airlines, which is the fourth largest airline in the United States, to help them buy jets from Bombardier. Estimates of the cost of these loans to taxpayers exceed $1.6 billion. Frankly, the finance minister should be vetoing this corporate welfare and taking away the Prime Minister's credit card because it is just unacceptable to be blowing away this kind of money.
Then we have cultural nonsense. Quite apart from the almost $1 billion in subsidies to the CBC, there are numerous smaller amounts spent on questionable cultural grants that add up to hundreds of millions of dollars. For example, even though the previous foreign affairs minister skipped the world conference against racism in South Africa, his substitute, the Secretary of State for Multiculturalism at the time, blew about $2 million on everything from child care expenses and bottled water to Starbucks coffee mugs, cookies and wall hangings.
Also, in this year's budget was around $25 million for provincial cultural events, 84% of which went to Quebec while the entire west, Atlantic Canada and Ontario received a paltry $3.8 million. The finance minister needs to put a stop to this sort of nonsensical and irrelevant spending.
The minister of heritage has a $2.2 billion Canadian heritage ministry. It has been identified by the auditor general as having no clear objectives, no criteria for measuring the success of its programs, yet the minister asked for a $26 million increase this year.
The example set by the minister herself leaves a lot to be desired. For the third year in a row, she topped the list for the most expensive travel budget in the Liberal cabinet. She racked up $159,000 in travel expenses last year, well above the travel budget for the previous minister of industry, Brian Tobin, who spent $105,438. Brian's bill though was for just six months of travel, so I would guess that if he was still here he would easily have toppled the heritage minister's record for the current year. It is time the finance minister called in their travel cards and cut them off as well.
What an example of misguided Liberal social engineering the gun registry has turned out to be. Just as predicted by Reform MPs back in 1994, the cost of the registry has spiraled completely out of control, yet the police commissioner to date has been completely unable to provide a single example of a crime either solved or prevented because of the registry.
We do know though of one murder which was apparently committed as a result of the so-called gun control legislation. A man in Nain, Newfoundland and Labrador, who was prohibited from owning firearms incidentally, went to the RCMP and picked up a rifle that had been held in storage for him. He has now been charged with killing a 15 year old boy, but it has been reported that the aboriginal exemptions and adaptations of Bill C-68 forced the RCMP to give this man his rifle.
When the former minister of justice introduced the gun control bill in 1994, he promised us in the House that it would not cost more than $85 million over five years, yet the registry has already consumed more than half a billion dollars. By 2003 it is expected to reach a billion dollars.
Are Canadians really getting value from the $750 million already spent and several hundred civil servants employed by the registry? The minister should abandon this waste of money and transfer the funding to the RCMP, CSIS and immigration enforcement budgets where we could start to get on top of the criminal refugee problem that we have in the country. That is what we should be spending the half billion dollars on, getting rid of the thieves and cheats who come here because of our inability to control our borders.
The millennium bureau is another example of waste. It is unbelievable and amazing that the Liberals are still pouring money into the millennium bureau almost two years after the celebrations. This year they want another $9.7 million. Are they planning for the next millennium? I hate to think what the size of the budget will be 98 years from now. It is time for the finance minister to sell off its furniture and close the office down.
One of my favourites is the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. More than $100 million disappears into this unaccountable pit of government waste every single year. I have tried for years to get someone, anyone, to provide me with a logical reason why this sinkhole for taxpayer money should even exist, but the entire organization seems to be shielded from scrutiny. It is about time the minister pulled the plug on this one and made a payment on our debt with the saved money.
I have pages of examples here, but I know that my time is running short so I think what I will do is change the tone of the debate for a moment.
I move:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “that” and substituting the following therefor: “Bill C-49, an Act to Implement Certain Provisions of the Budget, be not now read a second time but that it be read a second time, this day, six months hence”.