Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-28, the budget implementation act.
It is interesting to note that every year the government tells Canadians how it is going to spend their hard earned dollars. I think Canadians are getting very concerned that the government seems to think money grows on trees. I think that Canadians have a general concern that the government, instead of reducing its spending and reducing its size, continues to grow beyond all necessity.
One of these interesting things was revealed just this week: that the executive branch of government, through the bilingual program, has grown by 20%. We are not talking about the entire workforce. We are talking about the executive branch or the bureaucracy. It is 20% more than it was two years ago. Canadians are concerned that the government, rather than reducing its spending, keeps increasing it.
The last budget that was tabled in the House calls for $14 billion of new spending. Canadians do not mind that 40% of that spending is for health care, but they are concerned that new money is always being added instead of the money that has already been paid into the pot being redirected. Particularly now, with the war going on in Iraq, Canadians are also concerned that the budget for the Canadian armed forces was not substantially increased.
It is not a question of new money going into necessary programs, but a question of the government's priorities and of the government reducing spending rather than always increasing it. Both can happen at the same time.
There is one other issue I would like to bring up and that is the issue of the national debt. The government seems to think that the debt will go away on its own, but it will not. Last year in the budget, the government predicted surpluses of $6.4 billion this year and up to $10.7 billion in 2005. To give the government credit, it has paid down the debt by $17 billion over the last six years, but the interest payment this year on the existing debt is $37 billion. That money could go somewhere else.
This is really of question of where we think our responsibility lies. Is it our responsibility to ensure that our children and our grandchildren are not going to continually fight this huge debt? Or should this money go into new pet projects that the federal Liberal government has on the table?