Mr. Speaker, I welcome this brief opportunity this morning to address Bill C-43, the budget implementation bill. I want to acknowledge the member for Central Nova for giving me the opportunity to be next to speak. I am sure my constituents appreciate that.
I have to say that, as I heard the last exchange between the parliamentary secretary on the government side and the deputy leader on the official opposition bench, I ended up shaking my head and thinking no wonder Canadians cannot make sense out of what on earth is going on in this Parliament today.
I am not going to follow the rabbit tracks and use up my time to try to reconstruct the absurdity of that member, who sat first in the Reform and then in the Alliance caucus, pushing and pushing the Liberal government to cut and cut until there was nothing left of some of our most basic services, such as infrastructure, as the member himself acknowledged, post-secondary education, health care and the broken child care promise. All those things that the government promised in 1993 that it would do if elected to office, his party across the way, the ultra cons, kept pushing the government to cut further.
Now he stands up and says that they on that side will repair the damage. However he does not quite say that he had a major role in pushing for the government to make these massive cuts in the first place.
This brings me to four brief points I want to make in the few minutes available to me. On the issue of the Atlantic accord, the government members and the official opposition members keep leading Atlantic Canadians to believe that they support the speedy delivery of the resources to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia that are contained in that accord.
However it is clear that instead of making this Parliament work, instead of taking the fact that if not every member, at least the vast majority of members are committed to doing that, the government, for its own cynical reasons, has tied up the Atlantic accord in the implementation bill in such a way that it is costing the people of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia dollars that they cannot afford out of the most basic services that they desperately need rebuilt as a result of the hacking and slashing by the Liberal government, egged on by the Conservatives.
If the government were serious about making this Parliament work, it would immediately do what it has been urged to do by the New Democratic Party. In this instance, one of those rare instances where we actually agree with the Conservatives, the government must take it out of the budget implementation bill, get the commitment of dollars flowing and remove the uncertainty and the threat that the Atlantic accord may go down the tubes because of the government's cynical and ham-fisted handling of it.
I want to pick up on the government member's bleeding heart comments about how important the government's commitments are to infrastructure. In my riding a few nights ago, hundreds of people came together in the fire hall in Ketch Harbour to say that they were desperate to get the new water and sewer facilities that have been withheld from them for 40 years.
The following statement was accurately reported by the provincial daily paper, the Halifax Herald , which reads:
While the municipality is kicking in $5 million, the provincial and federal governments are giving a little over $2 million combined.
In other words, the combined contribution from the federal and the provincial governments is less than one-third.
For many years we were able to put together infrastructure projects that were about clean water and sanitation with a formula of one-third contribution from the federal government, the provincial government and the municipal government.
The reality is that what is such a disgrace about the inadequate contribution of infrastructure funding to this project in my riding in Halifax is being repeated again and again all over this country because the government has systematically decided to give billions and billions of dollars in tax breaks to big corporations and the wealthiest of Canadians over the years, still including in the budget $4.3 billion in tax cuts to corporations while people go without the basics of clean water and adequate sanitation services. Those are the priorities that are still reflected in the provisions of the budget implementation bill that we have before us.
I want to say that hope springs eternal. Last night we heard the Prime Minister basically say that we had to get on with the job and do what needs to be done. I think every Canadian wants to see the government cooperating with the opposition parties to do what needs to be done but that starts today, this hour, this moment with indications from the government that it is prepared to do what needs to be done to make changes in the budget implementation bill that is before us.
I hope the government will not literally drop the promise made by the Prime Minister last night across the airwaves and the very next morning turn its back on the commitment made. Let us see if the Liberals mean what they say, and that means changing the legislation that is within their control and the budget that is before us and begin to get the job done, which requires the government changing some of its ways.
The next thing I want to speak to is post-secondary education. During the election, the Prime Minister, in a desperate bid for votes in an all Canadian job interview targeting youth, the post-secondary education students, said he would return $8 billion to post-secondary education funding. I do not think anyone expected that he would return $8 billion of post-secondary education funding all in one budget.
We are dealing here with a Prime Minister who loves to talk about targets and timetables and who says that if we mean the commitments we make, we develop an implementation plan, develop timetables and targets and say how we will keep this promise of recommitting $8 billion to core funding and education, and at least begin to ease the burden that has been heaped on our students.
Has the government done this, even in the budget implementation bill now before us? Absolutely not. Not one red cent was recommitted to rebuild core funding for post-secondary education in the budget, and we know the disastrous results. The results are that tuition hikes continue. Students at Dalhousie University in the heart of my riding have seen almost a 10% tuition hike as a result of the $8 billion broken promise that was made by the Prime Minister on the eve of the election.
Finally, I tried to speak to what is happening locally and to what is happening nationally and internationally. It has to be one of the biggest disgraces of this budget that the Prime Minister and the government yet again have turned their backs on the long established commitment made by a previous prime minister, Lester Pearson, that Canada would lead the way in committing 0.7% of our GNP to overseas development assistance.
Again and again people before the foreign affairs committee have pleaded the case for us to honour our commitment to the millennium development goals, honour our commitment to actually be a good global citizen and commit to that 0.7%.
Not only was there no indication that they were prepared to do it in general, there was absolutely no implementation plan, no targets and timetables, to the utter disgrace and humiliation of Canada in the international community.