Mr. Speaker, I think it is not unreasonable to assume, although one might be accused of cynicism, that the government will not keep its promises given its record of not doing so.
That said, of course in the budget documents much is made about the expenditure review process that the government engaged in this time. Only in the federal government, of this government's mismanagement, would the idea of reviewing priorities of expenditures be seen as original thinking. Everyone in their own home does this all the time. Every successful and most unsuccessful small businesses across the country do this all the time. Virtually anyone who has ever had a modicum of business acumen does this all the time.
However, here we have to read pages after pages. There are two pages in the budget documents on agriculture and 29 pages on how the government is going to review its expenditures. Methinks much ado about nothing. Methinks the Liberals make too big a case for doing something they should have been doing for a decade.
I was the minister of government services in Manitoba when we were forced by this government's downloading to the provincial governments to take an extremely sharp pencil to a lot of our expenditures. One of the areas that we in Manitoba, along with most of the other provincial governments, really took a strong look at was the area of procurement, purchasing, tendering, management of properties and so on. There are actually literally billions of dollars in savings to be derived in that category alone through better government management. Those billions in savings have been derived by provincial governments and the MUSH sector as well.
However, here we have a government 13 years after the fact saying it is going to do the same thing now. It is follow the leader. We have not had to follow the example of the federal government. We have proceeded at the provincial and local levels to manage better not because of their example but because of their downloading to us. Only in the federal government would government services efficiencies be considered a new, novel, original and creative way to manage government expenditures.
The government has said that well over half its committed reductions in expenditure will come through better purchasing of things like computers, centralized order placing, special orders and things like this. This is so funny and so pathetic because these are things that provincial governments were doing a decade ago, as I have said.
The federal government and this Prime Minister like to talk about what prudent fiscal managers they are, but it is clearly evident that any credit belongs to the Canadian taxpayers on whose backs this government has based its own undeserved reputation.