Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part once again today in the debate on the budget implementation bill.
I had the opportunity to give a brief speech in the House a few days ago in anticipation of the coming budget. I am taking this opportunity to remind the House again of the importance of various initiatives in the previous budget and also, of course, of what needs to be done to ensure the prosperity of Canadians.
I neglected to mention when I started that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Davenport.
The last budget included a number of extremely important programs, which deserve mentioning. For example, the New Horizons program was reinvented, if that is the right word. I invite all members, especially those few—I know there are not many—who might be inclined to vote against this budget implementation bill, to remember that the new New Horizons program is in this bill.
So we should be proud of this but also support it so that these programs are implemented. This is an excellent initiative. I want to take this opportunity to ask the Minister of Finance, in the coming budget, to increase the funding allocated for the renewal or reinvention of the New Horizons program, which we are familiar with from a number of years ago.
I was surprised, even astonished, earlier today when I listened to the hon. member for Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry. He and some of his colleagues, the extreme right of the members opposite, claiming that the Government of Canada has not done enough for rural Canada. A little later, another Conservative member, the one who has just finished speaking, told the House that we should simply stop collecting tax money and redistributing it. That would certainly further worsen the situation in rural areas.
That is the Conservative position. Here is why I say that: in eastern Ontario, thanks to the last budget—that is, the one before us today in this budget implementation bill—we have a program to help rural communities in eastern Ontario. In other words, all of eastern Ontario except Ottawa and Kingston.
This program—it is only a one-year pilot program and I will come back to that later—is intended to help rural communities. Its aim is to give them a chance to get ahead. Thanks to the intervention of the eastern Ontario caucus which is so ably chaired by the hon. member for Northumberland—Quinte West, thanks to the actions of the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister, thanks to the association of mayors and reeves of eastern Ontario, who also favoured this program, we have obtained it. Unfortunately, it will only last one year. Therefore, the first thing we want is to have this program confirmed in this bill. The other thing we want is to make it permanent so that in the future, eastern Ontario's rural communities will be able to move forward.
It is important to say this for the benefit of the people in the riding of the hon. member for Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, who has made negative comments about this program all over eastern Ontario. If he votes against it, his voters will call him to order, as they should. The same may be said of the other Conservative members who might be tempted, in their usual bumbling manner, to vote against the Minister of Finance's excellent bill.
Returning to the upcoming budget, this morning I spoke with some farmers from my riding who telephoned me because of yesterday's debate on agriculture. As you are aware, Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives wanted to see the government take a unilateral step concerning one of its programs, which would have eliminated the provincial component. As a result, farmers would have ended up with 60% of their benefits, rather than the 100% they have today.
Needless to say, we on this side of the House are not in favour of that approach. Farmers are suffering enough already without losing 40% of their benefits.
However, we do have the package for the mad cow crisis already mentioned. We need to step up our assistance to farmers, but we must not neglect the needs of other agricultural sectors. For instance, it will soon be spring planting time, and unfortunately a number of farmers in my region have not been able to make early seed purchases. The earlier you buy, the better the price. But they have had to wait because they are short of money.
They are having serious problems. Last year's crops did not bring the prices they ought to have on the North American market. So incomes are down and farmers are increasingly in need of advances for purchasing their seed.
I hope that the hon. Minister of Agriculture and Agri-food will be able to enhance this program in his budget and thus increase the amounts allocated to the advance payments program I have just described.
That is what I wanted to touch on briefly today in this connection. It is to be hoped that the Minister of Finance will come up with a good budget and that we will all acknowledge what he and his predecessors have accomplished since we became the government in 1993.
I would like to close with the new unemployment statistics released today. Once again, the news is excellent. The government and the Minister of Finance deserve our congratulations. In the past years, we were one of the few G-8 economies to have created employment. We are also the only one among that illustrious groups of nations to have managed to achieve a balanced budget, and better yet to have paid off the debt accumulated by previous governments.
Do we need to remind hon. members of the last Conservative government, the Mulroney government, one of whose members I see across from me as I give this speech I spent a long time preparing earlier today? That hon. member must be aware that close to one-half of the debt accumulated during the entire history of Canada was accumulated by a single prime minister. That person, we must admit, was a Conservative Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney to be precise, he of the same political stripe as the chief whip of the official opposition sitting across from me, much as it may pain him to accept that. It is, however, reality.
Over those 10 years, our Liberal government has not only presented balanced budgets—I think we are up to seven in a row—but it has also paid down the accumulated debt, created employment and achieved a rate of unemployment that is far lower than ever before. I congratulate the Minister of Finance and all his team on these achievements.
I am therefore calling upon hon. members to support his bill and, of course, to support the excellent budget we will no doubt be seeing in the next few weeks, hopefully including extra assistance for our farmers.