Mr. Speaker, obviously a number of issues were raised.
I addressed the throne speech overall because the written speech by the parliamentary secretary from the Yukon who spoke before I did mentioned the throne speech. I had an obligation to clean up some of the rhetoric put forward by the member and at least give a contrary opinion from the official opposition.
Specifically on the first issue that the member raised with regard to the GST rebate, certainly the provinces have offloaded to the municipalities. The federal government has been offloading fiscal responsibilities to the provinces. They will be thankful for anything that they get. As I said in question period last week, a starving man will be thankful for any few crumbs that he gets from the Liberal government.
That is one thing but it is a very separate other thing to have a sustained, long term program for financing to the provinces and municipalities. If we want to simplify things dramatically with regard to the fiscal federalism that we have and the disconnect that we have in this country, it can be boiled down relatively simply.
The Constitution of 1867 has the signature of all provinces on it. That document applied today in 2004 in Canada means that two-thirds of all services that citizens enjoy in this country from governments come from the provinces principally and municipalities and one-third from the federal government. However the federal government consumes two-thirds of all tax dollars in this country. What we have always argued for and in fact what the House argued for was to fix that fiscal imbalance to make sure that the provinces have the appropriate level of financing to address their needs and their concerns.
I would assure the member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell that if he asked all the towns, villages and municipalities in his district if they had a choice between a little bit more of a GST rebate or sustained stable financing, given the fact that 99% of all roads that people drive on in this country are engineered, built and maintained by the provinces and municipalities, how about getting some, if not all, of the 50% of the tax bite that we take on gasoline back on a steady basis so they could finance the growth and needs that they have, they would jump at that opportunity. That is the very policy that our party believes in. That is the very policy that I thought the whole House believed in when on October 7 we voted 202 to 31 in favour of making that happen.
The former House leader for the former prime minister has demonstrated once more why Canadians voted to have a change and to have a real democratic deficit adjustment in this country. The problem has been that the current Prime Minister that he is now apologizing for has again failed to do that.
What Canadians will recognize in this debate and what Canadians will recognize in the coming couple of months as we head into the election campaign is that the real political party that has persistently been on the record in favour of democratic change and honouring this House and putting gas tax dollars back into the hands of provinces and municipalities is the new Conservative Party. We are the party that has kept our word and we will continue to do so.