The member is a little premature with the applause. Nobody ever talks about the extra $140 billion that went on the debt from 1993 until the government finally got things slowed down and turned around in 1997. The Liberals should look in the mirror. Some of the blemish is on them as well for those high deficit years and the high debt accumulation that we face in this country.
The Prime Minister stands in his place and tells everybody he has fixed health care for a generation. Then the other day he stood up and went off on a tangent. Even he does not believe that anymore. He knows it is not working, because the provinces are still scrambling to deliver health care to their people. In spite of what the Prime Minister says, in spite of that political rhetoric, it is not fixed for a generation. As it turns out, it is going to take a generation to fix it at the rate these guys are going.
The rhetoric and the actual solutions never quite balance off. That is part of the problem we see in this budget. We see the equalization formula coming under attack. In order to make this budget saleable, the Liberals have hooked in the Atlantic accord. Of course the other provinces, Ontario, Saskatchewan and even British Columbia, all these other provinces, are coming forward and saying, “Wait a minute, this thing is almost 50 years old”.
There are some 30 different formulas that make up the way they arrive at the numbers of who gets what. Non-renewable resources have to be taken out of the formula. It requires 10 provinces to agree; I think we are getting close to that. Everybody has some concern and the Liberals will not address it. The Prime Minister will not even sit down with his country cousin from Ontario and talk about it. He is saying that there are more substantive issues. In reality, there are not.
Money makes the world go around when it comes to governments. That is the lifeblood, that taxation system and the cashflow that erupts from it. What about when a province is not getting its fair share, as is the case in Saskatchewan? There is $1 billion a year for the last eight years that we have been watching, that we have not received and that we should have received under the formula that is a sidebar deal with the Atlantic accord.
We have a problem with that, because that really comes back to haunt the farmers, especially in Saskatchewan. The provincial government, rightly or wrongly, is not ponying up its share. It has some dollars in the wrong pigeonholes, there is no doubt about it, and that extra $1 billion probably would be tossed aside and put on some of its pet projects, like the potato fiasco that took place in that province. However, the reality is that Saskatchewan still has the right to that dollar. Then it is up to the province's electorate to decide whether they like what the government is doing or not.
The federal government, in its wisdom, likes to take on all that power and control it through the dispensation of money. In the budget itself Saskatchewan gets a bit of money for equalization through the treatment of the Crown leases: $6.5 million out of a $1 billion shortfall. That is an insult. As it turns out, Ottawa keeps the mine and Saskatchewan gets the shaft. That is what is happening. It is a little short of what has been promised or even what has been talked about.
I started talking about agriculture a minute ago. One of the major concerns I had with the original budget was that again agriculture was left out. There were a few dollars tossed around here and there, but most of those dollars went to the bureaucrats and different government programs. There was really nothing to the farm gate other than a cashflow promise to cow-calf guys, which does not start for over a year, not until 2006. Of course this is the year we are having trouble because the government's own safety net programs do not work. We are always destined to fail.
The Liberals are great at making big announcements. We heard one again a couple of weeks ago: another $1 billion. The consumers in the big cities ask how farmers can be hurting when they have been given another $1 billion. It sounds like a lot of money, but when we get past the smoke and do not look at the mirrors that the Liberals are setting up around there, less than 50¢ on each of those dollars will ever or could ever be delivered the way this particular program is set up. It is a separate sidebar deal outside of the CAIS system that was supposed to be the answer to every farm gate woe.
I guess that in doing this the Liberals are finally admitting that CAIS is not working. We cannot even get a cash advance out of that critter, so the government has come up with another way to try to trigger money out to the farm gate. The reality of that one is that delivery, as I said, is going to be about 50¢ on the dollar of what is announced, and it is going to get clawed back in any future payouts through CAIS. It negatively affects our reference margin, which holds us even more in abeyance in any further cashflow. It is another recipe for disaster.
Again, the government is great in the promises and the headlines are always wonderful, but reality never measures up. That is the balance that the Liberals always seem to miss. As we get closer and closer to an election, they have to start looking over their shoulders and saying, “We promised this. Where is the delivery?”
I am sure that this time around Canadians are going to hold these guys to account, not just for the Gomery inquiry and the sponsorship fiasco, but for every other little aspect that they promised and never really delivered on.