Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Edmonton—Strathcona.
We have a lot to talk about today with regard to the budget. My definition would simply be that it is an apologetic budget. The government has been in charge for 10 years and has yet to get it right. As evidence of that, government program spending has gone from $100 billion when the government took office to $150 billion now, an increase of 50%. That is not sustainable spending by anyone's definition, but it does not stop there.
We have examples of overspending and the budget was somewhat apologetic for all those mistakes the government made in the past. It is not just mistakes. Some of them are criminal in nature and charges in some cases will be laid in terms of what happened to taxpayer dollars.
By way of example I will give some interesting observations around this place in the last couple of weeks. Obviously these are spending scandals that we brought to the floor of the House as the official opposition. One of the scandals is the disappearance of $160 million or so from the Department of National Defence. How did $150 million to $160 million walk out the back door? Nobody knows on that side of the House and they are not sure what the figure is. Is it $150 million or $160 million or is it more? However it shows that the government is clearly out of control when it comes to spending.
This unravelling of the government and its strong position in the polls that it had following the coronation of the present Prime Minister seemed to come very quickly. It all comes down to a question of trust. Who do Canadians believe and trust in terms of some of the boondoggles perpetrated on the Canadian taxpayers?
At this point it is pretty clear in the eyes of the average Canadian that they do not trust the Prime Minister in terms of some of the excuses that he is using for the mismanagement of Canadian taxpayer money.
I could be wrong on this but, in terms of understanding who the new Prime Minister is and what he is all about, I think it started on the night of the CBC townhall meeting that was broadcast across the country. The Prime Minister went into a little public meeting, took questions and responded to questions put to him by the audience. Some of his responses just were not believable.
For example, one woman, I believe from Calgary, asked the Prime Minister a question concerning CSL, Canada Steamship Lines. She wanted to know why he only pays 2% taxes when the average Canadian corporation pays somewhere in the vicinity, all things being equal, of about 29% taxes. The Prime Minister responded by saying that he had always been a tax haven buster and that he had eliminated tax havens.
On the face of it, that is probably true with the exception of his own company. He, as finance minister, preserved the tax haven in the Barbados to protect his own interests. We will admit that he closed down some of them, but the one that gave his company the kind of break that any corporation would love to have, is still there and is still being enjoyed by his family if we believe he turned over the assets totally and irreparably to his sons. However the fact is that it is still the Prime Minister's company. It is a company that was built by the present Prime Minister and he has played unfairly by tax rules that he could have changed.
When he pretended that he was a tax haven buster, no one believed him because he could have done something but chose not to do something.
When the member next to me wanted information regarding the Prime Minister's company, CSL, the Prime Minister responded by asking how much money his company, CSL, received from government contracts. The answer, which was in response to a question on the Order Paper, was about $73,000 worth, which was clearly wrong.
The member for Edmonton Southwest, of course, persisted, which is one of the beauties of digging, persisting and not letting the government off the hook. Finally, the Prime Minister and the government had to confess that the figure was not $73,000 but somewhere between $150 million to $160 million in contracts to the Prime Minister's company. Coupled with the fact that he was only paying 2% tax because of the offshore registry that he enjoys, which he should have shut down but did not, there is something fundamentally wrong with that.
The member then asked the Prime Minister when he knew about that amount of money. It being his company, the Prime Minister would have known that his company did more than $73,000 worth of business with the Government of Canada. How did he respond to that? His response was that he was busy with the leadership race. He was busy with the leadership race for 15 years. For the 10 years that the Liberals have been in power he was simply undermining his leader every single day so I can understand why he was busy. However no one believed his story. No one who runs a corporation ignores $161 million in income. It just does not happen.
When the Prime Minister was successful in his leadership bid, he stood in the House and said that he would run the Government of Canada like a business. A few days ago our finance critic, the member for Medicine Hat, said that it was unfortunate that the Prime Minister did not tell us that the business was Enron. If people ran their business like that they would be out of business.
What we in this House are trying to do is put those people out of business. The truth is that the Liberals have lost trust. Their trust with the Canadian people has been broken. They have stepped over the line. They have had 10 years to get it right and the numbers just do not add up. They have gone on a spending spree, wasting taxpayer dollars.
One of these, Mr. Speaker, which I know, since you come from a rural area, drives you crazy but you are very limited in what you can say about it because of your position in the House, is the gun registry. We could have taken the $2 billion that has been wasted on that registry and put it in the budget. The Prime Minister of Canada could have had his finance minister stand up and say that he was ending the program simply because it was not working. All the Prime Minister of Canada had to say was that it was a failed policy and that $2 billion in taxpayer money has been gobbled up only to find out that it has not worked.
However the Liberals will hold on to that and try to carry it through the next election, despite the internal bickering and fighting within the party, which is another problem.
I want to give a couple of examples of what $2 billion could do for my home province of New Brunswick. It could pay for eight years of salary for 4,444 police officers. Given the annual income of New Brunswickers, 93,765 New Brunswickers could be paid for a year. Two billion dollars could buy 66,000 police cruisers. Members can imagine how we could have had a real impact on crime and the protection of average citizens.
I am out of time, but I will turn the floor over to my colleague from Edmonton—Strathcona. I have a feeling he will continue on these themes of spending, overspending and lack of direction by the government. It had a chance to get it right after 10 years, and it has not. It is time we replaced the government.