Madam Speaker, I am delighted to be able to add critique to the budget that the Liberals are pushing upon us.
We know, of course, that the legislative process, the parliamentary democratic process in the House, is severely limited. It is very unlikely that my speech today is going to change any of the minds of the Liberals. I just wonder how carefully they are listening over there and whether or not my appeal to their reason is going to say, yes, we should change this.
As a matter of fact, it came to me very early in my elected career why we have had such fiscal disasters in this country. Soon after my first election in 1990-93, I was asked by a member of my constituency how come, with all the best economic and accounting minds in the country available to the Department of Finance, we had sunk into such an extremely low level of economic prosperity and such a huge debt.
You will remember, Madam Speaker, that in 1993 it was a great issue. We had so many people who were really concerned that our annual deficits were severely hampering the ability of the government to deliver programs when one dollar out of every four was being spent just on interest. That continues to be so, despite what the government tries to spin in our direction.
I would like to emphasize that the call for deficit reduction and elimination came from us. As a matter of fact, if one were to check the record, one would see that when we first arrived here as Reformers in 1993 and in the next few years while the government continued to add to the debt, it regularly made all sorts of scurrilous comments to us because we had the gall to suggest that there should be balanced budgets.
Now, having done it, the government endlessly gloats about it. I am glad for it. I am glad that we are no longer adding to the debt of our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I am very glad and--in a way I do this often in the House--I give the government a sort of reluctant compliment for having resisted the temptation to spend it all, because that is what Liberals do. It is just part of their nature. I do give them reluctant congratulations for at least not being able to figure out how to spend the billions of dollars coming their way, mostly because of the issues they were against.
We will recall that in 1993, 10 years ago, the Liberals ran that election on two big issues. One was that they were going to kill the crazy free trade agreement. Today it at bigger risk due to the Liberals right now because of their way of engineering the deteriorating relationship with the Americans. One billion dollars a day of our economy depends on that trade. They were against the policy in 1993, but it did work, and now it has brought such prosperity to the country that even the Liberals could not figure out how to spend the money that came our way because of it. Yet they were against it philosophically.
The other issue they ran on in the election was the GST, saying, “We will kill it. We will nullify it. We do not want that tax”. Well, Madam Speaker, we still have it. It is still there. And it is bringing in a lot of money. In my view, it is a huge brake on our economy. I would like to see it reduced. In fact, that is what we have been saying all along. We would like it reduced in stages until it is zero, because it is a huge administrative nightmare for every employer in the country and for every business person. It is a drain on the economy on that account but it does bring in a lot of net revenue to the government, which has used it in order to stop borrowing. That is okay. The government is not borrowing anymore.
However, the Liberals also like to say--and I believe the parliamentary secretary over there can hardly resist heckling and I appreciate that he is so good at resisting--that the government has brought the debt down. The parliamentary secretary himself likes to say, “We have brought the debt down”.
It is curious when we look at the numbers. Despite the fact that revenues are way up, the amount by which the Liberals have reduced the debt is actually less than two of the thefts it has been involved in. I use that word advisedly, but generally when one takes money to which one is not entitled we call it theft, so that is the word I am using. The government took money to which it was not entitled. It took over $40 billion from the EI fund. That is how much it has taken out.
Has it reduced the debt by $40 billion? As a matter of fact, the debt increased from, as I recall, around $508 billion to $583 billion after the Liberals came to power. They reduced the debt, all right, but not by the amounts they took from the EI fund and the civil servants' pension fund.
As a little aside, if you will indulge me, Madam Speaker, I read in the paper the other day that the ex-finance minister, now seeking to become the prime minister, is divesting himself of his shares in his shipping company. I read a little article that said before it happens he wants to get back his pension fund surplus there and have it paid to him as a cash payout. I forget the amount. I think it was around $80 million or something. It is chump change for him, but for most ordinary Canadians it is an astronomical amount of money.
This was done to the federal civil servants while he was the finance minister. The government unilaterally said, “We have a surplus of $30 billion there and we will just take it”. I searched in vain to see where that entered into the public accounts and how it was used to pay the debt. There was no direct connection. Yet between the EI overpayments and the theft of the civil servants' pension surplus, we had $72 billion. If it had all been applied to the debt, then the debt now would be close to where it was when the Liberals took office. Instead, it is still considerably higher. I am disappointed in the budget and in the implementation act we are debating today because of the fact that there is no specific plan to reduce the debt.
I recently read about what happens in this intergenerational transfer. It is very embarrassing to us in our generation. Let us say that I am taking my children and grandchildren out for a picnic. We are on the way to the picnic with my son driving the car while I am in the back with the grandkids. While they are not watching, I reach into their little lunch buckets and eat their sandwiches and take their chocolates and things like that, so that by the time we get to the picnic their baskets are empty. If I were to do that, everybody would say, “What a nasty grandfather that is. Two weeks ago he was bragging about his new grandson and now he is eating out of their lunch and leaving them nothing”.
Collectively, we in our generation, with the government continuing it, by having this huge debt, this is what are we doing to our children and our grandchildren: We are eating their lunch. We are saying that we will enjoy the benefits of all these programs and we will let them pay for it for generations to come, plus interest. I think that is unconscionable.
The fact is that this government, being given huge amounts of money as a surprise, could not figure out how to spend those amounts and therefore had to apply it to the debt. And now it is gloating because it reduced the debt, the debt that it had allowed to grow to such a hugely astronomical amount.
That is one thing, but for it not to have a plan to reduce and eliminate the debt is a tremendous failure on its part. It is the biggest failure because the servicing of the debt is still the biggest expenditure of our government and it is saddled onto the next generations.