Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand with my colleagues today, on the fourth day of debate out of a possible six, and talk about the last budget, tabled in the House roughly a month ago.
The biggest thing I see in the budget is that anything to do with taxes went up immediately while anything to do with spending, where we get our tax money back in programs we may or may not want, is all done over the next two to ten years. There is a huge disparity here as the government takes in all this cash and then spends it out.
The problem with a lot of the budgetary process we have to grapple with in this place comes back later in the fall and in what we are dealing with now, which is what is called supplementary budgets.
Last fall the supplementary As were tabled. They addressed the shortfalls, let us say, in a lot of different government departments. Among them were a couple of contentious issues, such as more funding for the gun registry, which practically everybody has come to hate because of the costs involved. No one has a problem with safe gun handling and so on, and no one has a problem with registering gun owners, but the problem has arisen in registering all of the guns across the country. That is where the rubber met the road and the government found itself lacking. Programs like that are already in place, but the government has blamed a lot of it on a computer registry that would not work and so on.
I was in Ontario for the municipal convention two or three weeks ago. One fellow talked about the number of drivers and cars registered annually in Ontario. Those numbers were pretty much a correlation to the numbers of gun owners and firearms that the Liberal government says are in this country. The government has had a number of years to register the same numbers, using a computer program that totally failed, yet Ontario does that on an annual basis with car drivers. Serial numbers, people's ages and the same types of requirements are still being dealt with, so how can one province do it annually and yet the federal government cannot seem to get it right in the last seven or eight years? It has spent $1 billion and still does not have it right.
We see that type of thing come up in the supplementary budgets and I know that the government is going to take another stab at it in the next day or two in the supplementary B budgets. This time it is asking for $172 million or thereabouts for that failed gun registry, and that will keep this thing alive until the end of this fiscal year, the end of March.
The last time I looked at my calendar that is two weeks away, so the government needs another $172 million to pay off some debts that occurred because it could not cover them with supplementary As. The government withdrew that itself. In an unprecedented move in this place, the government actually pulled back that demand for cash. Now it is bringing it forward again, but it needs $172 million to run this thing for another two weeks. That does not make a whole lot of sense. Then it wants another $113 million for next year, according to this budget.
This is not just about the tabling of the budget. It comes down to performance reports. Did taxpayers get any bang for their buck or are they just buying a pig in a poke, as it were, and continuing on with somebody's legacy? It is a major question out there.
I looked at some of the specifications in this budget. Global government spending increased 7% in 2001 and 18% in 2002, well above the rate of inflation. We are going way beyond keeping up; somebody has a wish list here that they are trying to cover.
Last year an announcement was made on a major five year tax reduction package. Where is it? I have talked to people in my riding, and my constituents have phoned me telling me they have not seen that on their bottom line. I know that my paycheque as an MP does not reflect any tax savings and, Mr. Speaker, I am sure yours does not either. What happened to that? It has all been pushed off again. None of the major changes happen until 2004, and I guess that is an election year. What a coincidence. Imagine that. Imagine that the government would bring in tax reductions in an election year. How about that?
Program spending is another thing. Spending for the period 2002-03, which is ending in two weeks, will be almost $179 billion. That is how much money the government will take in. It will spend most of it on whatever is required, and a lot of it we question. Next year it is going up to $185 billion.
A lot of folks out there, as well as a lot of my constituents, are saying that we talk a lot of numbers. One million dollars used to be a big number, but now anybody can win that in a lottery. We can understand $1 million and we can get our heads around that, but as for $1 billion, which is where all the government numbers seem to float, people cannot get their minds around the disparity in these numbers. The government lost $1 billion here but is pledging $1 billion there, to official languages or whatever it is, and people cannot seem to get their minds around the disparity.
I had a fellow at a meeting in Owen Sound explain it. He said that the best way to get it across to folks was to convert it to time. He said that if we converted a million seconds it worked out to 11 days rounded off. A billion seconds is 32 years. That is the disparity. That is the difference between a million and a billion. If we convert that back to dollars then people start to realize that the kind of money that is squeezing out between our fingers here in Ottawa is just huge.
With that spending of $178 billion, the new finance minister, the rookie, challenged all government departments to find $1 billion of savings out of that $178 billion, or half of one percent. That is chump change. That kind of money could be found laying around on the floors of most departments. Yet the Auditor General in her report said that the federal government last year misplaced, misappropriated or misspent $16 billion. Fifteen per cent of the spending went in the wrong pigeonholes. Programs could have been trimmed by that. That money could have gone to paying down the debt which would have brought our health care and infrastructure spending back online over the next few years. There is a huge disparity there.
The finance minister is looking for $1 billion in savings. The Auditor General had already told him earlier last year that there were $16 billion and she laid it out line by line. She said money could be saved here, here and here but that was not mentioned. None of that has been addressed, that type of money that could be found and reassessed.
It really flies in the face of so-called good fiscal management. If we had those kind of dollars coming through the federal coffers over the last decade--and there was one government in place for that last decade--where did the money for health care go? Where did the money for infrastructure go? Why are these programs in such disarray that we have to start addressing them again? If we had that type of cashflow in any business situation no one would lack for anything. Each department would have more than it needed. Where did the cash go?
We saw huge cuts in health care. We saw the EI surplus absconded and shoved into general revenue, some $40 billion. I guess some of it went to those great projects in Shawinigan and so on, but there were cuts to health care and transfers to provinces of $25 billion; $40 billion in the EI surplus disappeared; $25 billion out of the pension packages for all government employees got ripped out and put into something else, and we are still these kinds of dollars behind in infrastructure.
The Canadian Chamber of Commerce calls the infrastructure deficit across the country somewhere in the neighbourhood of $57 billion. That is sewer, water, highways, bridges, and all those types of infrastructures. Every one of us in every riding across the country knows that it is very real. We started allocating money back to it, but the $3 billion here for infrastructure, added on to what we have seen in the last few budgets, is over 10 years. There is a $57 billion infrastructure deficit and the government is going to address it with $300 million a year. That will not even maintain it. That will not even fill in the potholes on the bad stretches of a road or repair a bridge, let alone build one. It certainly does not replace any water and sewer infrastructure.
I know we have had some major water and sewer problems in a city in my riding. It is trying to get some funding to address it but it cannot seem to trigger any money. It received a few hundred thousand dollars to address a couple of new wells but nothing of the magnitude it needs, the $20 million it is looking for.
A three year program just is not going to do it.
Here is another example that interests me from my riding. The Battlefords is the historic site of the Old Government House for the Northwest Territories. We governed from North Battleford probably three-quarters of Canada before the western provinces joined in, and right into northern Quebec. It was all governed from Battleford, Saskatchewan. We still have the physical structure of Old Government House sitting up there on government hill. As long as I have been an MP, and before that, for 10 years people have been trying to find the funding to restore that historical structure and cannot get five cents. I guess if we jacked that sucker up and moved it east we might find some money but we just cannot seem to tweak it now.
It is a budget that just does not go anywhere. It is based upon a lot of different issues but nothing that really crunches out.
The final couple of points I would make are these. The problem with a budget like this which tries to address a little bit for everybody really solves nothing. Another point that comes to mind is that with it being pro-rated out over the next number of years, it will be up to the next leader over there, not the current one, to deal with all the fallout. I think it is nothing more than another attempt by the Prime Minister to buy himself a legacy. Maybe he has alleviated a couple of problems, maybe not, but ultimately history will judge that these types of budgets have done so little for so few that they really were a waste of time.