Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to the budget implementation act and the dismal record that the government has had for the almost 10 years that I have been in the House.
I watched as, under the leadership of the Prime Minister, the government has kind of stayed the course and allowed the rising tide of economic growth that in Canada was by the virtue of the good management of Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in the United States who got the North American and western economy really growing during the 1990s. The government sat and watched the money roll into the coffers, and the budget balanced.
It was not the good management of the Liberal government that balanced the books. It was the fact that the economic policies emanating from Washington provided the spillover to our economic growth. Revenues rose and the budget balanced. It was a magic formula for the government.
However what we really need is leadership. There has been no leadership on the economic portfolio in the country in the 10 years I have been in the House.
Spending continues to rise even though the government said it would cut spending. It is now up to $175 billion a year. While it is spending that kind of money, it has only been able to find a couple of billion dollars for our military resources. We know the military hardware is falling apart and falling out of the sky. Can the government get its mind around new helicopters? It says no, that there is no money for new helicopters.
The government has no priorities. We had the opportunity to stand with the western world and defend it in the last month or so but because a few of our men were sent over to Afghanistan the Prime Minister said that there was nobody else available. The government sent off the ships with our only helicopter on board and one day out at sea it lifted off the deck and fell back down, and that was the end of that escapade.
Unfortunately, our military and Canadians are embarrassed about the state of our military and yet the Liberals have a great big fight about how they can demonstrate buying new helicopters without admitting that they were wrong in 1993 to cut the helicopter program. The spending has no notion of trying to focus spending on what is best for Canada.
We have new programs being announced basically just before elections to buy votes. On the two days before the election was called in the year 2000, the minister of finance at the time, the member for LaSalle—Émard, stood up and introduced the heating fuel rebate. It was an emergency at the time and the government said that it had to get the money into the hands of Canadians because they could not afford to pay their heating fuel bills. That program cost us $1.4 billion.
Some people said that was a good program because it helped Canadians. However the Auditor General pointed out that, by the government's own criteria, of those who were entitled and needed the money only $400 million went to the people who needed it and $1 billion went to people who did not need it. That of course, as we know, included some people in the graveyards, in prisons and in seniors homes where they were not paying utility bills. All those people were getting tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money when the government just spread it right across the land because it was election time.
Not only that, but 90,000 Canadians who needed the money, by the government's own criteria, did not receive a dime. It was a billion dollars wasted and 90,000 Canadians did not receive it when they should have received it. The government said that it was good policy.
We are now in the year 2003. What did we hear at the public accounts committee yesterday? Long after the price of the bills have come down again and long after the 90,000 people who needed the money have paid their bills, the government told the public accounts committee that it wanted to pay out another $13 million to another 86,000 Canadians to help them to pay for the high heating fuel bill that they had in the year 2000. We expect the government will be back next year, in the year 2004, to tell us that it will be handing out money to people who do not need it to pay their utility bills for the year 2000.
Is that good management? I do not think it is good management. I cannot understand why the government feels it can use taxpayer money in this way, just spread it across the land and say that the Liberal government is good.
The Liberal government is not good. It has no focus and no direction. There is no “follow me to the promised land because I can see prosperity at the end of the line”. No. The government just muddles along, taxes the people until they start to squeak and then it eases off a little bit. It then spreads the money around to anybody and everybody it can find who might use the money, and buy Liberal popularity.
We think of the HRDC billion dollar boondoggle. It does not matter if there is an application on file. It does not matter if people qualify or meet the rules, the government just sends them a cheque, preferably this week rather than next week because the sooner they get it the sooner they will be happy.
We know about the $1 billion for the gun registry. We were told it would be a $2 million program and it is at $1 billion and counting. It would not be so bad if the government had just underestimated the costs, if it is possible to underestimate the cost of $2 million instead of $1 billion. Do members know what we found out, again at the public accounts committee hearings? A large part of the $1 billion cost, somewhere in the region of $500 million, was invested, wasted, on computer programming because the government had no plan for handling the computer programs to maintain the administration of the program.
The government went through 1,200 revisions of the computer program. The computer programmers were busy writing away, stopping and starting again because they had a new vision. They would start on the new vision, write away and then stop, throw it in the garbage and start a new plan. The value of that work went straight into the trash can and provided zero benefit to Canadians.
Unfortunately that is due to the leadership we have received from the government and the member for LaSalle--Émard who was the minister of finance for a number of years and who now wants to lead the entire party. While we know what he is opposed to, we really do not know what he would be supporting should he ever take over the Prime Minister's job. Canadians should be quite alarmed by that because while he would dump the Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs' bill to bring in some accountability to our native peoples, perhaps change the Kyoto agreement and a few other things he has talked about, we have no vision from the former minister of finance who sat in his seat for eight or nine years and allowed spending to increase and did not bring any focus to the finances of the country. We are apprehensive about where the country is going under the Liberal leadership.
I wish I had more time. I could go on and on, perhaps at great length, about the problems that we see, but I will hold my fire for another day.