Mr. Speaker, in rising to speak to the budget debate, I should perhaps remind the House that government budgets are about spending other people's money. It is very easy for us to forget that, especially when decisions are being made on the other side of the House about grandiose social engineering projects such as the gun registry that was mentioned by one of my colleagues earlier today.
People forget that this is about spending other people's money. Members should spend a little time thinking about the families in their ridings who are struggling to get by, to pay their mortgages, to buy their groceries and to pay all the bills while the government over there grabs so much of their paycheques to pay for things that those people do not want. It is all about spending other people's money and I will give some examples of this.
While we are busy spending other people's money, it is very easy to forget that the success that has given that side of the House so much money is not because of the Liberals' policies particularly; it is because of the governments of Ontario and Alberta, those free enterprise governments, and the initiatives they have taken to make business and the economy work well. That is who has generated the wealth for that side of the House to spend.
Not only are the Liberals spending other people's money but they are spending money that was created because of other people's efforts, not their own efforts at all.
I can give the example that as soon as politicians get into election campaigns they think it is a great idea to spend other people's money. Just yesterday or the day before, Quebec Premier Bernard Landry promised that he would force companies to make a four-day work week available to parents with young children. The pay would be commensurate with four days but he would force the companies to pay benefits equal to a five-day week.
It is so easy for politicians to stand up and pass something in a budget that dramatically affects the business community with no consideration about the hardship that it would put on companies or the people who work there.
A good example from the federal government along a similar line was increasing the maternity benefit to a year. I got lots of letters of complaint in my riding. One would think it would be the opposite but people are not stupid. They realize that if they are going to be paying for people to stay off work for a year, it will be tremendously disruptive to business and it will cost taxpayers a lot of money. But again, it is so easy to spend other people's money without giving a thought to the consequences.
I have stood in other budget speeches in this place and asked members opposite to reach into their own pockets and pay for those grandiose schemes they are so much in favour of. Why do they not ever reach into their own pockets and support these things instead of expecting the rest of us to pay for them?
Out of 10 provinces and 3 territories at the moment, only Alberta and Ontario are net contributors to the system of national transfers. I am looking at a newspaper article which mentions that the C.D. Howe Institute has repeatedly noted that for every dollar the provincial governments of these two provinces receive in Canada health and social transfer, Alberta and Ontario taxpayers pay out $1.30 in federal taxes. Where is the value for that? Meanwhile, for every dollar the Quebec government receives from Ottawa, it pays only 70¢ to Ottawa. A similar situation exists for the so-called have not province of Newfoundland and Labrador where taxpayers only pay 50¢ for every dollar they get back.
What this amounts to is the taxpayers of Alberta and Ontario, let us say families who are earning $30,000 to $40,000 a year and paying federal taxes, are actually subsidizing families in Newfoundland and Labrador who are earning $40,000 or $50,000 a year because of the massive transfers to support grandiose programs there. This is not fair.
Albertans and Ontarians, like British Columbians who until recently were also net contributors to the system, are as patriotic as anyone else but they just do not think that it is a fair system of redistributing other people's money.
At the time B.C. crossed into being a have not province, in the last couple of years, our traditional spending federal revenue status saw only about 8% of federal spending in B.C. That was despite a generation of providing 13% of the national revenue. We were providing 13% of the national revenue and, for a whole generation, we never got more than 8% of the federal spending. Now we are a have not province and we are still only receiving 86¢ for every dollar we send here. There is something terribly wrong with a system that does that.
The federal fuel taxes alone in the year 2000 in British Columbia took out $750 million from B.C. That was $750 million with not a cent spent on our highways. We can look at the terrible condition of some of the highways, including the Trans-Canada. Parts of the Trans-Canada in British Columbia are so dangerous that they are not even registered as a highway in the North American register of highways.
I was in the United States for a few days over the break. It is astounding the amount of money going into infrastructure and freeways down there. It is absolutely incredible, the freeway building that is going on. The highway system is such an important part of a country for the transport or the ease with which commerce can take place. It is just appalling to come from such a marvellously developed country into one like Canada where we see no spending on infrastructure at all, with nothing being spent on the Trans-Canada, while the federal government drags huge amounts of money out of the economies of the provinces.
Of the $5 billion-plus that the federal government drags out of fuel taxes, 100% just goes simply into general revenue. In comparison, in the United States 92% of those revenues go directly back to the states to spend on their highways and that is why they have decent highways. That is why their infrastructure has developed so well and why that country does so well.
In British Columbia, as I mentioned, we have the Trans-Canada in a terrible state. Highway 97, the major freeway in Vancouver, is not even as wide as the freeway through Ottawa because there is no money to expand it, yet we have almost four times the population. There is something wrong when this government looks after its own territory but is not interested in helping the provinces look after theirs.
Again, if that is not bad enough, as I said, the government gets into its social engineering plans using other people's money. The federal Minister of Transport right now is currently soliciting VIA Rail to reinstate its subsidized passenger rail service between Vancouver and Calgary. That was a disaster. We spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting that unprofitable line decades ago. Thank goodness it was finally canned when Rocky Mountaineer took over with a privately funded and run railway. It makes a profit. It attracts tourism to the provinces of Alberta and B.C. It is a spectacular success. Why on earth does the government want to spend other people's money creating another subsidized railroad to undermine the businesses that pay the taxes? It just does not make sense.
This budget is so full of examples like this that it is sickening. I could stand here for a whole day talking about things like the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. One of my pet hates is its $120 million a year, pretty much unaccounted for, which is spent on all sorts of queer and strange projects. That is hundreds of millions of dollars wasted. It does not produce any wealth in the country at all. Most of what the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council hands out in grants appears to go to financing vacation time for academics to travel to other countries and take photographs. It is certainly not contributing to the running of the country.
Right now in B.C., as I mentioned, we are suffering from highway problems. We have the Minister of Transport trying to undermine our private rail service. We have the federal government refusing to talk about offshore oil exploration, which could help us tremendously in getting back on track and becoming a contributing province again. Why is it that we have to fight and battle our way for every single cent out of that budget while hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, are wasted on the gun registry? It is frustrating. It is about spending other people's money. It is a terribly bad budget. If we only could get our way, we would vote it down.