Madam Speaker, as usual when I listen to the member from Scarborough, I find that he must be a lawyer because of the way in which he couches his speech. He speaks like a lawyer. Ordinary Canadians outside of this place cannot even understand what he is talking about with all these great words and great percentages and everything that he puts in. He must be a lawyer.
Let me tell him that as far as Canadians are concerned, they look at what the Auditor General said. Where is the transparency? Where is the accountability? Let him talk about what his government has wasted. The government has wasted billions of dollars on the gun registry. They could do better things here. The member should not try to hide behind the figures out there by talking about the GDP and all those things.
As I was saying yesterday in my speech about this government, the so-called change the Liberals were talking about has not transpired. It is the same old government with the same old policies. There has been no change. There is a lack of vision and a disconnect from Canadians.
We can see what the Liberals are doing on the other side: they are trying to blame it on the Conservative Party now, on Brian Mulroney's party, yet they have been ruling over there for the last ten and a half years. They should forget about Brian Mulroney's record. They should talk about their own record, about what they have done here instead of going back there.
Now, as for their record, the member from Scarborough is absolutely right. The Canadian people will make the choice when they vote at the election. They will say to the government that there is no accountability and they will send the message that the Liberal Party needs to hear from Canadians.
As I said in my speech yesterday, there is a lack of vision and there is a lack of direction in the budget that the Prime Minister has presented, and this is a Prime Minister who was finance minister, the second most powerful man in the last administration. I think we better start using the word “administration”, because it is the same Liberal government doing everything.
Today I want to talk about international assistance. As the senior critic for international development, I noted that this budget has a $248 million increase for international assistance. We noticed the increase, but we do have some very serious concerns about how Canada's international assistance is managed.
The previous government made a commitment of an 8% increase. This $248 million shows that increase. However, when we are talking about figures, we can quite comfortably say that our contribution to international aid has fallen, to .25% of the GDP in 2000, and it remains below .03% of GDP. When we start talking about GDP percentages, it looks very low, but in reality over $2.5 billion is now going to international assistance. That is a huge sum of money.
What we need to know is what is happening with that $2.5 billion that we are allocating to international assistance. Right now we are in 105 countries, giving out money to small projects as band-aids. They are having no impact, no impact at all. I had a meeting with senior officials from CIDA and asked them to give me a success story, to tell me where CIDA has been. The officials have been involved in international development assistance since the 1960s and 1970s and I asked them to give me a success story. They could not give me a success story. Where did they put the money? It is a good question. Where? We do not know.
Let us talk about the countries that were recipients of Canadian aid and what has happened to them. Recipients were the continent of Africa and the continent of Latin America. What happened to the continents of Africa and Latin America? Those two continents today have the largest number of poor countries in the world, so what has happened to all our development assistance?
We were not there to issue development assistance. We were there just to show the Canadian flag. In reality, companies in Canada were the ones that were benefiting from this international development assistance, not the countries to which the aid was supposed to go.
Now, fine, it has been recognized that this was a mistake and the government is trying to address that issue, but I will tell members what the biggest flaw is. We are a country that has absolutely no legislation on determining how to achieve and what are the objectives of our international development assistance. The U.K. has just issued a legislative agenda to tell the bureaucrats where the money should go, but here in Canada the bureaucrats tell us where the money is going. There is an oversight from Parliament, but that does not mean we are telling them where the money should go.
What do we have? We have bureaucrats deciding which countries will get money, where the money will go and how the money will be spent. At the end of the day, it goes in all directions, and as it goes in all directions, there are no concrete results coming out of that kind of thing.
Let me give an example. I stood up in the House two years ago demanding that we stop aid to India and China. Why? Because these were the emerging economies that did not need the small amount of money we were giving them.
What did the minister stand up and say? He said, “No, we have to give the money to them. There are poor people in those countries”. Of course there are poor people in those countries. I agree. But these countries also have governments that should be responsible for their own citizens. What spectacle do we end up with? A year later we have the spectacle of the government of India telling us to pack our bags and leave.
Yet the government did not get that message from China. China sent an astronaut into space. China spent $3 billion dollars on that. Why would the Chinese not worry about their poor while we are saying we are worried about their poor? Even now the aid workers will not move out of China. I do not understand why not. It is not that China is poor. Yes, there are poor people, but the reallocation of resources in China should be the responsibility of the government of China, not the responsibility of the Government of Canada. Still the minister will not agree to that request.
We keep throwing away international assistance money, yet our budget says that we are going to increase our aid spending because we need to help the poor.
I wish to make a small comment on an announcement that the Prime Minister made today. I will say that we were the first to support the initiative of changing the legislation to send cheaper drugs to Africa to fight AIDS. We recognize the importance of this. We recognize the devastation that AIDS is causing. We recognize our commitment. Our party is supporting this legislation and finally we see this legislation moving forward.
Last, I would like to say to my friend on the other side, my friend from Scarborough, that, yes, I also am waiting for an election.