Mr. Speaker, I am happy for the opportunity to speak today to the budget implementation act, Bill C-28, but I must say that the Canadian Alliance has a lot of concerns about the budget which was introduced in the House on February 18.
The new finance minister could have chosen to change the course set by that of his predecessor in the last several years but he chose not to do that. One has to wonder why that is, although most reasonable people might expect that it had something to do with the Prime Minister's legacy program. When someone has been in office for 40-some years and he still has to buy himself a legacy in the last year out, that seems like a pretty sad commentary, but that seems to be part of budget 2003.
In addition to that, the finance minister perhaps is launching a leadership bid and that may be part of it and may partly explain why we see the kind of spending increases that we have identified in budget 2003: $25 billion in new spending over the next three years. It is not just spending, it is a smorgasbord of sloppy spending. Other than the $5.3 billion this year for the health care increases, it is spread so thinly in so many areas that it may be of little benefit to anybody.
What we have seen from the government is a pattern over a long period of time of trying to buy votes and not really caring what the outcome of the legislation will be as long as it looks good on the surface. It is like the Hollywood storefront image that we see in the westerns; nothing behind it.
The budget includes $2 billion in unspecified Kyoto projects and $1.5 billion again shovelled out to unaccountable foundations. The Auditor General had a considerable amount to say about that in the past, that this was not the type of corporate accounting that we accept in the corporate sector so why should we accept it from the Government of Canada?
The budget contains $1 billion for the national child care system which will bring it to roughly $10 billion. That money has to come from somewhere. Six billion dollars will be spent on the federal bureaucracy, an increase in spending that seems reminiscent of the 1970s.
The budget contains little tax relief and what tax relief there is, it is spread over several years. I am thinking of the capital tax, of which one portion will be phased out. I heard more about the capital tax than any other thing when our committee was travelling across the country. When I was the industry critic for our party we heard that this was a very discouraging tax on investment, but the government is only taking one part of it out and only doing that over five years. That is the type of example we see in budget 2003.
Many commentators have suggested that the budget was really the end of fiscal discipline in Ottawa, but I would like to demonstrate why that simply is not the case at all. It really is a return to old Liberal values. The fiscal discipline only took place in about 1996-97, for two years, because the government was driven to the wall and had to do something about it. I will make that case.
I submit that this is really a continuation of the Liberals' tax and spend policies that put political expediency ahead of good policy, wasteful spending over restraint and accounting trickery over transparency.
The reality is that since 1993 the Chrétien-Martin tag team increased personal and corporate income taxes 53 times.