Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise and address Bill C-49, the budget implementation act. Although there are things in the bill I will speak to specifically I will start by talking about the overall budget and addressing some issues my hon. friend raised a moment ago.
The hon. member said he thought it was a courageous budget. I could not disagree more. As I have said various times in the House in the last month when I have had a chance, it is the worst budget the government has ever brought down. In the past the government has done things I grudgingly had to admit were good. However this is the worst budget it has ever brought down.
Not only did the government raise the level of spending dramatically in the budget by 9.3%. It was also careless. It brought in all kinds of innovations it later had to turn around and change because the budget was not well thought out. The government had to change how it would handle the Africa fund. The infrastructure program is another example.
There is no excuse. This was the first budget in about a year and a half. The Liberals had lots of time to think about it. It is not like they were pushed into coming up with something at the last moment. They had lots of time to consider it but they absolutely blew it.
As important as what is in the budget are the things the government left out. I will start at the top. The thing that characterizes the budget and the government the most is a complete lack of vision. When looking at the budget there is no sense that the government understands Canada is losing the competitive battle in the world. We are falling further and further behind. This is reflected in our falling dollar and our falling standard of living. It is never seriously addressed. It is like an elephant in the middle of the room that no one wants to talk about. However we face it every day as citizens trying to make a living and scrape by.
As responsible adults we have an obligation to leave the country better than we found it. We are not meeting that obligation. The country is getting poorer and poorer. We are losing many of our young people to the United States. That is the vision that is not in the budget. There is no ability or willingness to confront the fact that Canada is losing the competitive battle in the world.
There are many things we could do. My hon. friend spoke a moment ago about Kyoto. Is it not wonderful that the government is coming to grips with Kyoto? However there are many other issues. The government wants to take the initiative on Kyoto even though we would be completely out of step with the Americans. However in terms of the day to day things that fundamentally affect people the government is completely out of touch.
What could the government have done? There is no question that in the wake of September 11 security spending has been necessary. The government has never addressed the question of why it cut defence and security spending so deeply in the past while maintaining high levels of spending for grants and subsidies.
However let us set that aside for the moment. The truth is that we need to invest more in our military, in intelligence gathering, and in defending our borders through increased enforcement by customs and immigration officials. We need to do these things. The opposition does not quibble with that. We have absolutely no objections.
Instead of raising the overall level of spending we should be cutting spending in other areas. The auditor general brought out her report not long ago which mentioned many areas where the government is failing the test of fiscal prudence.
One example is ACOA. ACOA is a regional development agency in Atlantic Canada. It provides what it calls non-repayable loans to different groups which sounds an awful lot like grants. The auditor general noted in chapter six of her report that ACOA had “not reported publicly on its performance in managing $400 million of repayable contributions”. This should give us pause. An agency supposedly answerable to parliament and the Canadian people has for some reason not reported publicly on the management of $400 million in repayable contributions.