Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise on behalf of my constituents of Battlefords--Lloydminster and speak again to budget 2005.
Of course this is a bit of a stretch, in that the budget for 2004 is still sitting in the Senate. This is definitely a pre-election ploy. We have a budget coming down in the dying days of this Parliament, no doubt about it now. We hear the Prime Minister and some of the other ministers saying, “Oh, no, we are going to lose all of this if things happen”. But it really flies in the face of logic when we see that the budget for 2004 is still sitting in the Senate, which is controlled by Liberals at this point. There is no reason for it to languish there other than the fact that these guys campaign a lot better on promises than they campaign on reality, so I guess that is part of the reality bite over there.
The last member who spoke talked about balance, saying that the Liberals do certain things because they are trying to strike a balance. I guess there's a balance that they have never really been able to handle: political rhetoric and promises are one thing, but trying to balance that off with practical solutions never seems to collide in this place. They are always held far apart from each other. As I said, the Liberals campaign better on promises than they do on reality.
There was an interesting editorial in the Montreal Gazette , which says that the Prime Minister suggests that “a quick election must be avoided because his [minority] government has not accomplished anything yet...this might be a better reason to bring down his government than to sustain it”.
There was a huge, ambitious agenda, which is what the Prime Minister ran his leadership on and of course also last year's election, the throne speech and now the budget. There is all this ambition they talk about, but we are not seeing anything move ahead. We are seeing bill after bill introduced and get shovelled off to committee, which helps the Liberals control the committee agenda, but nothing ever really goes past the starting gate from this point and gets out there to the people.
Last year's promises have not been delivered. As I said, they are still tied up in the Senate. The ones that have been pushed through this place and are at committee are largely ignored at this point as committees get piled up with legislation that is coming forward. The stuff that did sneak through is either forgotten about or the promise is broken and it is not being delivered, so at best, that ambitious agenda started, stumbled and fell. It never did get going like everybody thought it would. The hype has not measured up to the reality in this case.
The Prime Minister was touted all through last year and he chased Mr. Chrétien until Mr. Chrétien caught him; there is no doubt in anybody's mind now. The hype was that he was the Liberal Party's biggest asset. I guess they got it half right, because everything is coming home to bite, and it is all tumbling down.
This house of cards cannot last. We are seeing some unprecedented things. There is more money than ever to play with in this budget. That means taxpayers are getting ripped a little too deeply. We are seeing a lot of time and energy tied up in the sponsorship fiasco, and rightly so. Justice Gomery is doing a tremendous job. Whatever it costs is not an issue with me and my constituents. We want to see the bottom of that barrel. We know whose face is going to be reflected back out of there, so let us keep on going with Justice Gomery. An election call is not going to stop him. He is on a roll. He has his witnesses lined up. He is ready to go.
The concern I have is that we will not see a report until November of next fall at the earliest, and judging from what these guys on the opposite benches do with reports from the Auditor General and different people who blow the whistle on them, those reports kind of get buried and sanitized and cleaned up. When the reports finally do see the light of day around this place, they are usually too late or there is so much whiteout on the pages that we cannot really tell what the person wanted to say in the first place.
We hear ridiculous arguments like “forensic reviews”. There is no such animal. I am not a high-priced accountant or lawyer or anything like that, but I have run a lot of businesses. There is just no such thing as a forensic review. The government is hiding behind this type of rhetoric.
There is a tremendous amount in this budget that sort of starts to go in the right direction, but these things either never got a plan or dollars attached. It is always, “Trust me. We are from the government. We are here to help. We will get it right. Give us five, six, seven or ten years out there and we will see some differences”.
We heard a lot of talk about what great things the government has done balancing the books, but nobody ever talks about--