Madam Speaker, at some point in his speech, my Liberal colleague was complaining about the opposition. He said that if we said something often enough people would come to believe it. This certainly would characterize the strategy of the hon. member when it comes to the budget and to many other things.
I have witnessed the Liberal Party in government adopt this strategy over and over again with respect to their budgets. This is certainly true in the case of this budget, where the government members hope that if they say over and over again that this budget is generous in so many respects, when it actually is not, Canadians will come to believe it has been generous with respect to health care, the environment, the infrastructure and many other things. I hope the hon. member will have an occasion to reflect on the fact that what he accuses others of, his own party specializes in.
I might also say, Madam Speaker, that I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Dartmouth.
One thing I have find amusing about the budget debate is the way in which the Liberal strategy has been complimented by the Alliance strategy. They pretend that they are really at odds with each other but there is a funny kind of way in which they serve each other's purposes very well.
The Liberals want Canadians to believe they have spent ferociously and generously on things like health care, the environment, infrastructure and on a variety of other things. They want Canadians to believe they have opened the purse strings and they are beginning to deal with the social, human and environmental deficit which they created over the years with their cutbacks in federal transfer payments to the provinces and in various federal programs themselves. They have not done this.
In fact the overwhelming evidence is that the budget continues a tradition of being very tight with respect to the federal purse strings, allocating more money to tax cuts and to debt reduction than in any way to begin to address the social deficit that has been created in this country since 1995, when the then minister of finance, now the lowly member for LaSalle—Émard who in many people's judgment the future prime minister, brought in his budget of that year and commenced the destruction of so many things that Canadians held dear.
How does this relationship between the Liberals and the Alliance work? The Liberals want us to believe they are really spending and addressing these deficits they have created, social and environmental, when in fact the budget is a real disappointment. However they have an ally in their propaganda with respect to their budget. That ally is the Canadian Alliance because, as I said the other day in the House, the Liberals pretend to spend and the Alliance pretend that it is true.
The Prime Minister has had no firmer ally in wanting to get Canadians to believe that he has actually done something significant in the way of spending than the leader of the official opposition and his colleagues who day after day get up in the House and criticize the government for spending. Our position is that they are both wrong in this respect and that they are collaborating, either intentionally or unintentionally, to mislead the Canadian public as to the real nature of the budget.
This budget is truly a disappointment. I think even for those in the opposition, the New Democrats and others, it is always more difficult if a government brings in a budget that has in it truly welcomed measures. It is a more difficult job for the opposition. We were prepared for a budget that would be hard to criticize. Given the surplus and fiscal environment, we really hoped this would be the moment that this Liberal government would begin to address some of the many needs that existed before they were elected but which were aggravated as a result of policies that they followed during the last 10 years.
In this the Prime Minister's last budget and the Minister of Finance's first budget, though it might turn out to be his last budget too, we thought and hoped we would see real progress toward addressing the needs created by the Prime Minister's own policies over the last 9 or 10 years. That has not happen and it has not happened to the extent that Canadians do not fully realize that is the case. They have the Alliance to thank for collaborating with the Liberals in getting out the wrong message on this budget.
One thing is welcomed in the budget and that is the announcement of changes in the rules of accrual having to do with pensions for firefighters. This is something for which many people on all sides of the House have fought many years. I noticed that the Minister of Finance tried to pretend that this came about as a result of the individual efforts of one particular Liberal backbencher, but firefighters and those who have paid attention to this issue know differently. They know that last year, during the week the firefighters were here for their annual lobby it was myself who rose in the House and pressed the then minister of finance as to why this had taken so long.
At the same time as we welcome it, we also note how long it has taken. For years and years Liberal government backbenchers have agreed with the opposition that something like this should happen, yet it literally took 8 or 9 years for this to happen.
At times we have to wonder who is running the country. It is certainly not Parliament, if almost all members of Parliament agree on something yet it does not happen. However in this case it finally did happen, and I welcome that particular measure. I also have to give credit not just to Liberal members, but to all members of the House who over the years have argued for that. The NDP played a big part in that.
People really hoped this would be the budget in which the needs of Canada's various communities, particularly its cities, would finally begin to be met. We know that the urban infrastructure is deteriorating. We know there is a need to deal with problems now. There was a need to deal with these problems yesterday. We have not dealt with the problems of water and sewer systems, roads and mass public transit. We have been sitting on these problems for a decade. Perhaps the government was hoping they would go away. Others hoped that someday when the government actually had the money and the surplus it would begin to do something about them. This was the hope that people had for this budget, but it was a disappointment.
In the budget the funds provided for community infrastructure are laughably inadequate. In total, municipalities called for $2 billion a year in infrastructure investment within five years of which $1 billion would be for environmental infrastructure. They also called for unique programs for northern and remote communities in recognition of special needs. The Liberal plan will actually spend less on community infrastructure a decade from now than it will today.
This year, only $150 million will be invested in terms of new money. Over 10 years, only $300 million will be available a year. At this rate of investment, it may take 190 years to meet existing community needs. That is even longer than the average Liberal lead time on how long it takes to keep a promise. We know there was a lead time of something like 45 or 46 years between the first time they promised medicare in 1919 and when we finally received it in 1965 or 1966. One hundred and ninety years is really pushing even the Liberal envelope for delay when it comes to the realization of promises and meeting of needs.
I wish I had more time because I could go into detail on just how little the government has provided in this budget. If we were to divide it all up it would come to about $50,000 per community, which is not very much. It certainly will not provide all the water treatment plants that are needed in the country if we are going to take the Walkerton crisis seriously.
We need to have much better water treatment plants in our cities and towns. I know that in Winnipeg we need a backup system, which we do not have and we had a terrible environmental disaster last year when a system failed. The equivalent of 200 Olympic sized pools of sewage flowed into the Red River. If we are going to build a backup plant so that kind of thing cannot happen again, we will need more than the $50,000 that the budget has provided for every community.
Let us have an end to this unholy relationship between the Liberals and the Alliance, both of them pretending that the Liberals have actually spent something significant on what Canadians need. They have not.