Madam Speaker, this is the first time I have spoken since the birth of my new son Thomas, the newest constituent in Regina—Qu'Appelle. I have to be honest and say that this new constituent might receive a little bit more attention than other constituents in my riding. However I am sure the other inhabitants of Regina—Qu'Appelle will understand.
I would like to address a few aspects of Bill C-43. I think all members of the House will agree, and I think the members of the Liberal Party would agree if they had the boldness to be straightforward, that this bill should be divided into three separate bills.
The Liberals are playing games here with the budget bill by placing unrelated provisions into one single omnibus bill. This is not terribly surprising. We have seen this movie before. We have seen Liberals do this as part of the games they play in this House, but by all rights we should have a separate bill for the Atlantic accord, a separate bill for the traditional budget implementation measures and a separate bill for the Kyoto implementation measures.
I find it abominable that this government would sneak in, through the back door, Kyoto provisions when there has been no comprehensive plan laid out for Canadians. Canadians do not know what the government's intentions are nor do they know what it is going to do and how this will affect their actual quality of life, their economies and their jobs.
No plan has been outlined for Canadians about how the government is going to reduce greenhouse gases. We also have seen no plan to outline the Liberal Party's hidden agenda on buying hot air credits from other countries, including China, Russia and perhaps France.
What impact will Kyoto have on Canadians? Major economic and public policy groups are predicting the following: major increases in fuel taxes, a major increase in fuel prices, major increases in home heating costs and dramatic increases in home electricity costs.
For example, in the first few years it is predicted by many groups that there will be up to a 19% spike in gasoline prices, up to a 21% spike in home heating costs and up to a 35% spike in electricity costs. What this means for the average Canadian is a dramatic decrease in their disposable income. To drive their cars to work, to keep their homes warm in the winter and to power their homes and appliances it will cost more of their hard-earned dollars. More of their paycheques will be going toward utilities.
For my rural constituents it will be even more dramatic. They have seen the cost of diesel fuel almost double already and this is before any Kyoto implementation schemes. How much more will their fuel bills rise under the Kyoto plan?
I also want to mention that it is very disappointing to see the NDP position on Bill C-43. What the NDP is saying about the Kyoto implementation measures is that they do not go far enough. Can anyone imagine the New Democrats thinking that farmers in Saskatchewan should pay even more for their diesel fuel? I challenge any one of those members to come to my riding and look a group of farmers in the eye and say that their diesel fuel bills will increase and we are happy about it.
The farmers in my riding cannot afford the potential heavy costs of a Kyoto scheme that will see more of their tax dollars go to buy pollution credits, which will mean no actual reduction in greenhouse gases. It will simply mean a transfer of wealth from Canadian taxpayers to countries such as China, France and Russia.
China, by the way, has the world's largest military and an aggressive space program, and we are going to transfer our tax dollars to buy credits in China. This would not reduce greenhouses gases one bit.
The Liberal plan will have a particularly devastating impact on Saskatchewan in particular. We have seen Saskatchewan go from a have not province to a have province. This is not because of any good management on the part of the provincial NDP government. It is because of a huge boom in oil prices.
The extra revenues that come from the oil prices will keep our hospitals open, pave the roads in rural Saskatchewan and keep the utility costs where they should be for Saskatchewan residents. What impact will Kyoto have on Saskatchewan's oil and gas industry? If we lose just 10% of our revenues from these industries due to the hidden Kyoto taxes of the Liberal government, I think I can safely say that we will see more hospital beds closed as the revenues from that industry plummet.
I do not know why the federal NDP would want more hospitals to close. I know that the provincial NDP has a habit of closing hospitals. We all remember the closing of the Plains Hospital in Regina and the swath of beds closed just recently in rural Saskatchewan. This part of the bill really troubles me.
I would like to turn to the Atlantic accord very briefly and outline the duplicity of the Liberals in lumping that agreement in with this bill. Let us consider that the Liberals did not need to bring in an omnibus bill for the health accord. They did not have to wait for the budget to bring that in. I believe it took only 11 days for them to bring in the health accord in a stand-alone bill. Why can the government not do that for the Atlantic accord right now?
The finance minister is attempting to dither his way out of his obligations by lumping this in with the rest of the budget. The Liberals are holding the people of Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia hostage by linking that accord with this bill. We could pass that bill right now. We could have passed it the other day when my leader got up and challenged the government to bring it in. We would have given it unanimous consent at all stages and the people of Atlantic Canada would have seen the benefits immediately. The Conservative Party would do that.
We have seen a few other interesting facts come out of the proposed budget. We know that the Liberals misled Canadians when they attacked our campaign platform. They said our platform was fiscally irresponsible and then came in with pretty much the same level of spending we proposed, but without the substantial tax relief, which we knew we could afford because we knew the true size of the surplus and we were not playing games with Canadians by trying to underestimate the surplus.
It seems that the finance minister and the Prime Minister have numerical dyslexia, because they now have had the surplus wrong for seven years in a row, is it not? They have consistently given Canadians the wrong figures on the surplus and attacked our numbers based on their misinformation.
Tax freedom day for Canadians does not happen until sometime in July. It is unacceptable to think that every single hard-working Canadian working today is working for the government. Right now, for anybody off laying highway in rural Saskatchewan, about to get ready to start seeding or working any number of jobs, their paycheque is going to the government. The government does not let them keep any of their own money until the year is already half over. That is unacceptable.
I would like to touch just briefly on the issue of airport rents, which are having a direct impact on constituents in Regina. A major airline had to pull out of Regina, cutting back on its main line services because the airline industry is in trouble. It is in trouble because of excessive taxation on ticket prices through the air travel security charge. It is in trouble because of the various fees that are lumped in there. As a result, and we have seen this with Jetsgo, there are turbulent times in the airline industry. The airline industry employs thousands of Canadians.
I sit on the transport committee. The Minister of Transport came to our committee and said he is doing everything he can to get issues like airport rents addressed. Airport rents are costs that are passed on directly to air travellers. The cost of landing at an airport is directly related to the cost of the ticket. This means that travellers in and out of Regina, starting in 2006, will likely pay more for their tickets because those costs will go up. As well, we have seen airport workers in Regina laid off, essentially, and then hired back at half the wages.
This issue of airport rents is having a direct impact, not on the big corporations but on the individual people in Regina who are trying to travel in and out of the city on business or to visit family, and it is having a direct impact on those workers at the airports, who will now see a 50% reduction in their salaries.
Of course we know that the budget bill does very little for farmers. Most of my riding was hit by a devastating frost last August, which wiped out what was promising to be one of the best crops that the Regina--Qu'Appelle area had ever seen. Where is the aid? Where is the disaster relief?
The Minister of Agriculture came to Regina and outlined some spending which to date has not even been delivered. It took the government months to get out the forms from the last round of spending, and it took months to deliver them. I would like to see how much money was delivered from that.
Farmers in my riding need a direct assistance package that is meaningful. The latest one announced by the minister works out to about $4.80 per acre, I think, which will be just enough to pay the property tax increase that the NDP provincial government brought in for rural Saskatchewan.
We have a lot of work to do. Thankfully, there are enough Conservatives in the House that we can do some of this good work at committee. We will address these issues that I have outlined. We are going to try to do what the Liberals should have done and make this a better budget bill, because that is what Canadians need.