Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak today to the 2005 budget.
It is a little perverse and a little hard for people out there in TV land to understand budgets that come and go. As a matter of fact, we were still debating the 2004 budget the day after budget 2005 was tabled. It is just the crazy way this place works. With the election last spring, everything got backed off, backdated and back-end loaded as this particular budget is too.
I know we are not supposed to use props but this budget is government propaganda. The big headline was “The Budget Plan”. The budget is okay, but plan? There is no plan in here, which is part of the problem with this whole budget. We have announcement after announcement and a tremendous amount of money being spent but no plan is in place for how the government will actually put that money into play and get bang for the taxpayer's dollar.
We agree with some of the initiatives and with the direction in which they are going but they do not get there in a proper and precise manner. They are all back-end loaded. To begin with, nothing will happen until 2006 and the big dollars will only be seen by taxpayers in 2010.
What has happened is that the government has changed from its two year forecasting, which it used to do, and under the new finance minister is now using five year forecasts. The Liberals cannot even predict next year's surplus. They have historically underrated that surplus and then spent it down to try to get their numbers to balance and to match.
The minister himself, as late as last fall, was saying that the surplus would only be $1.9 billion. It turns out that he must have been dyslexic because the surplus was actually $9.1 billion. That is a huge differential in budget forecasting and yet now we are working with five year forecasts. If they cannot get five months' forecasting right, how the heck will they do five years? Those guys are traditionally out to lunch on their forecasts.
Budget 2005 contains $42 billion in wish list spending. In some instances it is money heading in the right direction but in a lot of others it is overspending because there is no plan.
Let us go down the list. Kyoto is identified in this budget. It was finally implemented on February 16. They have billions of dollars allocated to a Kyoto type function, addressing the environmental problems in this country, which is not a bad thing, but there are no mechanics, no nuts and bolts to say how they will put that into play.
They are also adding another billion dollar foundation. The Auditor General comes out year after year with scathing indictments on the $7 billion that is hidden away in foundations now. The money in a lot of cases is sitting there. The interest on the money in the millennium scholarship fund is not even being spent on kids for scholarships, which was the purpose of the whole program. It has become another wasteful slush fund. We have no plan on that.
They are going after the auto manufacturers and so on. I received a letter from a car dealer in my riding, Ross Ulmer, who has seven or eight dealerships and is a fairly major player in the auto industry in western Canada. In his letter he states:
In regards to the automotive industry the implications are enormous [of the Kyoto plan]. I am an owner of several dealerships and it does not take a lot of research to find out that the cars that will be offered for sale in 2010 have already been engineered.
The government is calling for huge reductions in emissions and everything and these cars have already been engineered and are already way under the 1990 carbon emissions. GM's manufacturing plants, which are in Canada, are already below 1990 carbon emissions. The clear hard fact is that vehicles manufactured in 2005 are 99% smog free. The dealerships have already done it and yet the government is going after them to do a whole bunch more. The dealerships are already within the Kyoto guidelines. The government is way off track on where it is going on some of these initiatives, again squirreling money away.
Health care has again been addressed in the budget. The Prime Minister is on the record saying that he will fix it for a generation. The problem is that it will take a generation to implement his fix. Again, there is no plan, just a lot of money being thrown around. He will control the rules and the spending. The provinces will not be allowed to fulfill the needs in their provinces unless the Prime Minister okays them, stamps off on them and says that it is okay to go. They are starting to do their own thing, and rightly so, because they have to.
Let us discuss infrastructure. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce says that we have a $66 billion problem in infrastructure. How do the Liberals address that? They address it with $600 million in the first year.
These were all part of their election promises and throne speech promises. Now they are saying that they are delivering on their commitment but we could deliver what they are delivering in a wheelbarrow. It is not going to take much to get that money out for these programs.
Let us look at agriculture. This is another year that agriculture and primary producers have been insulted. Agriculture was barely mentioned in last year's budget and no dollars were allocated. This year, after another horrendous year on the farm, agriculture shows up and there actually is a bit of a program for it but there is no plan and no money. The $130 million under the agricultural envelope in this budget is 0.3% of the spending. Agriculture, which is the third largest contributor to the GDP of this country and a huge trading component that creates jobs, receives only 3%, and it is in trouble.
Those guys missed it again. We have the border staying closed and we are not seeing any relief or any plan from the Liberal side. They talk about promises made and promises kept, but they have no plan on how they will implement any of these so-called promises.
Of the $130 million that was allocated in the budget for agriculture, $5 million is to be dedicated to PFRA. Those are government bureaucrats. This money will increase their management capacity to start moving out of western Canada across the rest of the country. We have been calling for the agriculture minister to allocate another $5 million to the PFRA but it was not for more management. We wanted more water wells drilled. We wanted a fall program to parallel the spring program that is always overbooked. A fall program would have alleviated a lot of that summertime drought when wells tend to dry up and disappear. The Liberals did not do it. They put it into management for more bureaucrats.
Another part of the allocation will be $21 million for the Canadian Grain Commission as it withdraws services from the prairies. Where the bulk of the testing should be done at terminal, it now only wants to do it at port. The commission's concern was that it did not have the budget to keep on doing it at terminal but if it is done at port we will lose the capacity to blend and gain a grade. The problem we have in the west right now is years of drought, frost damage and so on. We need to blend off that product in order to keep farmers farming. However we give another $21 million to a government agency that is not farmer friendly because it is withdrawing services.
We have $17 million added to the loan lost reserve program that was introduced as part of restructuring of the livestock industry last September. They allocated $38 million to it and now they have put in another $17 million. It is not all bad because it is supposed to stimulate processing. However when we had people from the Canadian Bankers Federation before committee the other day they said that no forms were available on the website or from the banks for anyone to trigger the first $38 million let alone talk about this other $17 million. Everyone says that a loan loss reserve means that people have to go broke before they can ever have the government come in and underwrite on that processing facility and that it will not stimulate any sort of packing expansion in Canada.
Things will have to be done through tax credits and regulations. We need to get CFIA out of people's face and allow them to do what they need to do, such as process some of the excess livestock that we have here. The only thing that deals with the farm gate is the $104 million program over five years of cash advances to livestock producers but it will not start for another full year. Other than taxes staying high for farmers, the budget contains absolutely nothing that will give farmers a bit of a break.
The only thing mentioned in the budget that will give farmers a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel is that the cash on deposit for the CAIS program will be withdrawn for 2003. However, again there is no plan. We have since asked the minister when this would happen. We know he has the provincial ministers, every farm commodity group and all the opposition parties in his face to get this done. The deadline for having one-third of the first cash deposit is at the end of this month. The guys out there are crying for cash and now they have to find the cash to squirrel away in a bank account at this government's whim because it needs them engaged. Producers are engaged to the tune of $44 billion debt. They are engaged in putting that seed in the ground or breeding that cow. They are already there.
The government also saw fit to withdraw the services of the farm improvement loan, which is a big hit again to Saskatchewan because we use those loans for capital assets on the farm. There is no more access to lending institutions. We are tapped and so are they. The government is sending a signal to the lending institutions that it does not want to backstop farmers so why the heck would a bank?
As was stated by other members, it is a negative impact. The budget contains no tax relief, pennies a day, and the equalization problems that Saskatchewan faces, like Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia did, are not even addressed. It is a billion dollar hit to Saskatchewan.
Time after time the government forgets where Saskatchewan is and, for that matter, the rest of Canada outside the Ottawa bubble. Even though the finance minister is from Saskatchewan, he does not even get it. Thankfully, other members of Parliament from Saskatchewan are here to get that message through.