Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Cariboo—Prince George.
This is a very dismal performance by the government. We are debating Bill C-48 but one has to wonder why. This seems to be the third Liberal budget since the February 2005 budget was introduced. Many people call it the NDP budget because, quite frankly, the two parties together do not have a majority in the House. I say that it is an illegitimate budget.
I do not think most Canadians will be amused with what the Liberals have been doing. They have been boycotting and filibustering their own legislation to not allow these bills to be debated and voted on in the House of Commons because they have become so desperate to hang on to power. They are hanging by their fingernails. This is a pathetic performance by a dying regime. We saw it in eastern Europe.
I have been in the House almost 12 years, like some of my colleagues, and this is the worst performance I have ever seen. I see desperate people making illegitimate agreements just to hang on to power. They are not respecting the parliamentary democracy we have in this country that at some time, and the Liberals do not seem to get this, maybe they will not be in power. They cannot conceive of that idea somehow so they will cut any deal and sign anything to hang on to power.
The budget was delivered on February 23 in which the Liberals announced $42 billion in new spending. They went back and brought the numbers up for the 2004-05 fiscal year. They said that the surplus would be $3 billion. Of course we snookered them by hiring our own fiscal forecasters at the finance committee who, just six weeks later, said that the Liberals were off and that the surplus was double that. It was $6 billion. For this fiscal year 2005-06 the Liberals have estimated a $4 billion surplus. The fiscal forecasters say that it will be $8 billion, only six weeks later.
The unplanned surplus that the parliamentary secretary talked about, I do not think so. We have seen this crass practice in the last seven years of lowballing surpluses to build up huge funds that they can use in election campaigns. That is really what this is.
Next came Bill C-43, the budget implementation bill. What did the Liberals do? They snuck in a couple of amendments. One was the Kyoto amendment, which all of a sudden was tagged on to the budget. Just a few weeks earlier it was not there but they snuck it in to put greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide in particular, in the noxious gas category to allow them to tax it heavily. Of course we cannot support that. We want to see it hived off and we will try to do that in committee, if we ever get there.
Then of course today there is the NDP budget, which is Bill C-48. What has happened since budget day itself? There has been an almost $8 billion turnaround. New spending plus the cuts in the taxes that were proposed under personal tax cuts and the corporate tax side has meant that essentially there is an $8 billion difference.
What do we have here? We have a desperate government trying to buy itself another election. It is in a massive spending spree. It is trying to bury Gomery by taking away people's attention from Gomery with this budget.
Let us look at what today's newspapers are saying. The headline in the Globe and Mail on page A4 states, “Liberal spending blitz hits $19.5-billion” . Steven Chase says:
--Ottawa's minority Liberal government has grown so big it now amounts to nearly half the spending unveiled in the February budget.
It goes on to say, “the 2005 budget was only two months old when the government began piling on extra spending”.
A headline in the National Post today reads,“Spending spree continues”.
Another article reads:
Federal government spending announcements have hit $22.3 [billion] since [the Prime Minister] went on television on April 21 to apologize for the Liberal sponsorship scandal.