Mr. Speaker, I hope the time that you allot me to respond will be commensurate to the time it took to get the revision of the Speech from the Throne out.
I respect what the member is trying to do in terms of propping up a sagging government, but he has missed some issues. I will touch on them quickly.
He has perfectly portrayed the image of the government which expects the people to be its servant. He said that the government wants the people to get some relief every time they pump gasoline into their cars, their trucks or whatever it might be, that they take to work, that it is time to help people.
The member talked about the federal government no longer collecting GST from municipalities. Why would the government ever do that in the first place? Why would a government have a tax upon a tax? Now the member expects the people to rush forward and say, “Thank you, wonderful government. You are giving back some of the money you should not have taken from us in the first place”.
The member talked about the debt. In case any of our new colleagues are not aware of it, when people get to this place, instead of their constituents' dreams being the driving force, their heads fill up with their own dreams. The only problem is the government wants to finance its dreams with my constituents' money. That is why when there is a surplus there must be the fiscal discipline in place, a law that requires a certain amount of payment on the debt. It is called a mortgage and most Canadians are familiar with it.
The problem is that as election time approaches, the present government--and other governments I will say in a non-partisan way, as the Liberals are not the only guilty ones--but as election time approaches, the government kind of forgets that it has a mortgage. The government forgets that it is mortgaging our children's future.
That does not work for my constituents. They cannot go to their banker and say, “I know I have a mortgage. I have no money left over each month to pay the mortgage, but I want to take a holiday instead. If that is okay with you, I am not going to pay my house mortgage for six months”. That does not work in real life, but it works in the Disneyland world of the government and it is hurting our kids. I want my kids and my grandkids to be able to go to Disneyland without that debt on their backs.
There is nothing in the Speech from the Throne to address that issue with the legislation required for that.
On the softwood lumber issue, as I mentioned in my remarks, we continue to win on that issue at the world trade court. About three years ago, it was one of our members who warned the government. He said that the softwood lumber agreement was coming to an end and to please get down to Washington and start negotiating for true free trade on this. He said that if the government did not, we would get slapped with countervails. The government said that would never happen, that it would not happen at all. It did happen, unfortunately exactly as we said.
There is no plan in place. I did not hear any plan on what the government is going to do. The only attack the Liberals have to fix the softwood lumber issue is to attack Americans with the most ridiculous language, hurling insults across the border. We are talking about protecting Canadian sovereignty. We do not maintain good relations with our neighbours by hurling insults at them across the fence.
The softwood lumber issue should have been fixed. If the government had been ready and prepared to do it, it would have happened. It was not ready and it is still not ready.