Mr. Speaker, it was interesting just before question period to hear the hon. member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell give an impassioned speech about his years in the House. I have not been here as long as he has, and unfortunately I was not recognized by the Chair in order to also give a short intervention during that time when really we did not talk about the bill before us at all. We talked about the member's service.
When he was talking it reminded me of my own parliamentary career, which I am happy to announce will not be ending at this election as opposed to that of the hon. member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell. I remember that when I was first elected we had a government at the time which, still fending off the Liberal debt it inherited in 1984, was still engaging in debt and borrowing. In the 1993 election campaign, when computers were just barely invented, I had a little computer running that showed the rate at which the debt was increasing. It was increasing at around a thousand and some dollars per second, which made for an interesting display on the screen.
Of course I pointed out to the people who I thought would vote for me that we were not doing our duty in terms of preserving the well-being, financial and otherwise, of our children and grandchildren in allowing that kind of debt to grow. It is very interesting that at that time our youngest son was younger than these young people here who serve as our pages. Now he is almost a old man. He is not really, he is a only little over 30, but that is certainly old compared to the young people we have serving us here as pages, about 50% older.
My wife and I had only one grandson at that time. Now we have five grandchildren. I think that this particular bill we are talking about today, Bill C-48, is a colossal failure and takes us right back to the passion that I felt in 1993 to manage properly the finances of our country on behalf of our children, grandchildren and all subsequent generations.
It occurs to me that the reason for this budget bill, Bill C-48, is totally ill informed. I would like to use a few minutes of my time to give some free advice to the NDP members. I would bet I will not get an ounce of protest from them today when I say anything here. I am going to give them some advice and just inform them how ill advised they are to make a deal with the Prime Minister.
They are hoping that they are going to get all this expenditure and here we have Bill C-48, which basically is the NDP side of this budget. They have cut a deal with the Prime Minister in order to try to get this deal. I am amazed that they would do that.
Now I have a little sidebar, as have nowadays in our lexicon. There was a private member's bill before the House under the auspices of John Bryden, who was a previous Liberal member, on access to information and the revision of that law. It was a good bill and we would have supported it, but unfortunately it died on the order paper.
It was then brought in by an NDP member from Winnipeg in pretty well identical form to what the previous Parliament saw. The member from Winnipeg made a deal with the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister said to him that the government was going to bring in legislation that would pretty well reflect the member's bill and asked that the member withdraw his bill, saying that the government would go ahead with its own.
In good faith, that NDP member said okay, He withdrew his private member's bill on access to information. What happened? About six months or eight months later, the Minister of Justice showed up at our committee. We were all anticipating that he was going to show us at least some draft legislation on what the bill would look like.
Instead, what we got was a great big long report on a new discussion paper, which means that we are going to start talking about it again. Needless to say, the member from Winnipeg was somewhat miffed.