Madam Speaker, it is good to speak to the budget in the House of Commons. This will be my last speech before the election and I want to outline a number of issues that are important to me in my riding and issues that were neglected in this budget.
Regardless of what kind of budget the government has, integrity and values are a very important part of any government's budget. The way people perceive politicians in the House of Commons, whether or not they vote for us, is important.
We have looked at the sponsorship scandal from this Liberal government of virtually $250 million of which $100 million of it went missing somewhere or was inappropriately spent and some of it got back to the Liberal Party. Is it any wonder people have lost confidence?
We see another member of the House stealing a $50,000 ring which is totally inappropriate and unwarranted. Those kinds of issues just harm everybody here in the House of Commons. If we were to do anything in a budget, we should spend a few dollars trying to wake people up in this House, and put some integrity and values in politics.
The avian flu has hit my riding and we are going to debate that issue a couple of hours from now so I am not going to spend any time on that. We will be looking for real commitments from the government on how to deal with that issue.
I want to identify a couple of things that were missing in the budget. There was no mention in the budget of the immigration deportation system, the whole refugee system. It is the kind of thing that the government does not like us to talk about, but I have three cases going on in my riding right now.
A fellow by the name of Phu Son came into the country and got on welfare, and stayed on welfare. He made a lot of money on grow ops. He bought three houses while on welfare, one in Abbotsford, one in Langley and one in Alderville in my riding. When he was caught, he went to court and the judge gave him a $100 fine. This fellow should be deported and those houses should be taken away from him.
What about the Canadian dream? What about all Canadians who are law abiding citizens, trying to keep a family going and raising enough money to buy a house ultimately? This fellow comes here and lives on welfare, and buys three houses. There is something wrong with the system and something wrong with the integrity.
Then there is a fellow by the name of John Fottvik. He came to Canada, beat a woman to death, set her body on fire and served 17 years. At his parole board hearing, he was told that he would be released on condition that he would be deported. The deportation immigration board told him to deport himself. A ticket would be sent to him and he was to show up at the airport at 6:30 on Monday morning and deport himself. Well, John Fottvik is still in this country and did not show up, of course, and nobody is bothering to chase him. The investigation people at Immigration Canada, the RCMP, say that they have other things to do, so that was a waste of time.
Conversely, let me tell members about a young lady who came to Canada from Germany with her parents when she was two years old. She grew up in Toronto in a nice family and then moved to Abbotsford in my riding. She graduated from high school and then was accepted into Harvard which is not an easy task. She graduated from Harvard with a chemistry degree and stayed in the United States for a year and then went to Africa for some volunteer work, and then wanted to come back to Canada.
She was refused entrance to Canada because she did not have a permanent residency card even though she came into the country at age two, went through school and lived in my community. She is an honourable Harvard grad. How many Harvard grads does Canada have? And she is refused entrance.
Meanwhile, I am fighting people like this drug dealer who is still in the country. I am fighting John Fottvik who murders a woman, and this young girl cannot get into our country. It makes me sick. There will be changes after this election to that kind of process.
The issue of drugs was also not included in this budget. I brought this issue up in the House of Commons and across the country. We studied it, a committee worked on it, and 41 recommendations were made on how to deal with cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, and crystal meth. None of those recommendations have been accepted and implemented by the House.
After an 18 month study and a $500,000 committee, the government dropped the ball. In fact, it felt the recommendations were a little conservative so it threw out a bill to decriminalize marijuana, sent the media flying in that direction, and did not even bring that bill in because the election is close and the government knows it would get hammered for it. Nothing has been done on drugs. I can assure the House that after this election, when we form the government, something will be done in that regard.
I call Highway No. 1, in British Columbia, from Hope to Vancouver a cow path because it is very similar to a cow path by today's standards. It is woefully inadequate. There are traffic jams at any time of day. It is the number one highway in this country and yet not one red cent has gone toward widening it and yet over three million people use it every day.
Missing totally from this budget was any amount of money from revenues to be put toward a crucial project like that where there is gridlock for trucks going in and out of Vancouver. Not one cent was included in this budget.
SE 2 is a generating plant which the Americans wanted right on the border. I live on the border of Sumas, Washington and Abbotsford, British Columbia. The Americans wanted to build a generating plant that would pollute our already polluted air, which, I might add, was also not addressed in this budget.
We managed to fight that for over three years and that generating plant was refused. Now a private American company is appealing to our federal court, but it will not be successful. The problem is that the air in the Fraser Valley is already brown. It is already a problem. Here we are fighting additional problems of air pollution from generating plants, and the government has done nothing at all about the air pollution in the area where I live, and the air is bad. That also was not in the budget.
People in my area might remember this when they go to the polls. We do not plan to lose. The last time we won by 72% and we expect it to be somewhat higher than that this time.