Debates of June 16th, 2005

An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to make Certain Payments

[Charlie Penson, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

Mr. Speaker, you will notice that the government members have not participated in the debate. The President of the Treasury Board has come in now and is heckling instead of participating in this very important debate on Bill C-48. If he wants to be involved, I suggest that he get involved in the debate rather than heckle the member--

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. Marcel Proulx)]

Let me remind the hon. member that is not a point of order. The hon. member for Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo.

[Betty Hinton, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson, BC]

Mr. Speaker, what can I say? I have chivalrous men in the same caucus with me who object to people harassing--

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. Marcel Proulx)]

Order, please. I would very much enjoy hearing the hon. member, so if you wish to carry on private conversations, may I suggest that you step behind the curtains. The hon. member for Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo.

[Betty Hinton, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson, BC]

Mr. Speaker, if the hon. minister is not interested in what I have to say he has an option available to him. He can go up the aisle and out the door. I do not mean to be difficult, but I was trying to explain something. I was going back to my being in business and having to have a business plan. I was mentioning the fact that a government that is going to make Canada thrive also has to have a business plan. We need to know what we are going to do with the money we take in from taxpayers. We need to know their priorities and their needs and those are the things that must be addressed in the budget.

When Bill C-43 was presented, there were options available to the Conservative Party. We could have followed suit with the NDP and the Bloc and at the first opportunity voted to bring this government down. That would have been easy and, in some ways, it might have been very satisfying, but it would not have been responsible. If there is nothing else that we are, we are responsible. We are responsible to taxpayers, to the next generation and we are responsible for what goes on in the House.

We have an obligation as members of Parliament to try to make things work. We have to make them work for Canadians. When we lose sight of what it is we are here for, Canadians, then we have a serious problem.

We were willing and attempted to make amendments, amendments that met the needs of our constituents, the needs of all Canadians, things that were missing from the budget, things that were not there that needed to be there, the priorities of Canadians that were not reflected. We were told, point blank from the Liberal government, that there would be no amendments and that was the end of it.

However we are patient in the Conservative Party and we decided to wait until it went to committee where we could actually have the opportunity to voice a large opinion on what needs to happen in the hope that common sense would prevail and that there would be acceptance of provisions that would make things better for Canadians.

In the interim, before that stage happened, there was a deal made between the Liberal government and the NDP. Some of the things that the NDP has put forward are things that are very important to Conservatives as well. We care about the environment, about the next generation and about affordable housing, but we are a Conservative Party that is fiscally responsible. We will not give anyone a blank cheque. It takes some trust for us to accept that when we agree to a budget the government will do what it says it will do.

I have only been here five years but I have watched more supplementary budgets go through and I have watched taxes increase and increase and I have not seen a big difference happening for Canadian people. In my own riding I still have residents who are reeling from the impact of the softwood lumber debacle. They have not been supported or helped, and there is no money in this budget for those people. We wanted to make that happen. We wanted to change that in the Conservative Party.

I also have a huge contingent of ranchers in my riding. These are people who have been around for over a hundred years producing food. These are good, stable, honest people whose livelihoods have been ripped out from underneath them because of a government that did not act appropriately or quickly enough. We have gone two years now with that debacle and nothing has happened.

The Conservative Party wanted to see those things addressed but the Liberal government said no amendments. However that story changed rather quickly when it made a deal with the NDP to stay in power. Let us be honest here, that is what that deal was about, nothing more, nothing less. It was about staying in power. Now it is saying, as a government, that it expects us to just agree with this. We should just say yes because, by golly, that is what it has decided to do and if we want to argue about it, it will make us look as bad as possible.

Well the government can go ahead and make me look as bad as it wants because the day I sign a blank cheque that I do not have to cover and taxpayers in Canada have to cover is the day I should head out that door and go home. I would be of no use to Canadians and to my constituents if I were to accept that kind of a deal. I will not accept that kind of a deal.

If we take a look at the budget that has been presented as Bill C-48, it is two pages with a little tiny paragraph at the top. If we take a look at that and we say $4.5 billion, 400 words, which is approximately what is in there, that is $11,500 a word. I cannot agree with a bill that does not show me where the money will be spent and does not reflect the needs of Canadians. It is a bill that allows the government to do whatever it wants. I cannot do agree to that and neither can this party.

Can I endorse some of the things that the NDP party wants to do? Yes, I can. If those could be done in a reasonable fashion or if the Liberal government wants to present me with a business plan showing me how it is going to implement it and tells me what it is going to do, then perhaps they would get my agreement.

In my life I have been a negotiator for contracts. I recognize the difference between the words “will” and “may”. The words in this legislation say “may”. I hate to disappoint the NDP, and maybe none of them have negotiated contracts, but if does not say “will” it is not going to happen.

The NDP has been taken for a ride in exchange for their votes. This is all a big farce as far as I am concerned. It is not going to happen. The government knows it is not going to happen and I know it is not going to happen, but the NDP does not seem to know that it is not going to happen.

The NDP members would be better off if they were to join forces with the Conservative Party. We could put our heads together to convince the government do what needs to be done . However they have chosen not to do that and there is not much I can do about that.

The one thing I really do resent is that we have a government that has gone to the FCM, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and has spun the FCM a tale that says that if this budget does not pass it will get no money. That is simply not true. It will get the money.

What the government has not told the FCM government is that it is the government's choice to tie Bill C-43, which we supported, and Bill C-48, which we cannot support, together. If thee money for municipalities is lost, it will lie in the laps of the Liberal government. It will not be the Conservatives that made this happen. It will be the government itself.

I would like to believe that everyone in this House has the best interests of Canadians at heart. If in fact that is true, no one can sign off on a blank cheque budget that does nothing to help Canadians and adds to what we already have, which is a half a trillion dollar debt.

The people in my riding are looking for help. They are looking for work and they are looking for some kind of optimistic future, something that they can look forward to. This does not offer it to them. Those cuts that are coming to corporations may very well cost 2,700 jobs in my riding.

I cannot and I will not support this and I urge the government to rethink this silly piece of legislation.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by reminding the member that some 11 months ago the Canadian people made a choice. The choice they made was to send the government in minority form into Parliament here in the House of Commons.

What is actually quite amazing is to hear the members opposite continue to refer to the government as apparently illegitimate and a government that is clinging to power, while their own leader seeks to undermine that power and steal it.

The reality is that the members opposite have lost sight of the fact that the Canadian people have spoken. They may wish to question the wisdom of Canadians in their choice but our job was to come here as a government in minority form and govern, which is precisely what we are doing.

The member opposite said that she was a former negotiator. As one former negotiator to another, she would understand that there is an obligation here in the House, in minority government form, to mediate through and find the middle ground and provide the kind of government Canadians are looking for.

We hear from the other side regularly about the fiscal performance of the government. Let us look at the case of Mike Harris and Ernie Eves and the wonderful new republican government of Ontario. We remember the republican government of Ontario: a $25 billion increase in the debt and a $6 billion hole that the people of Ontario are still digging themselves out of. There are many examples of republican governments here in Canada and in the United States.

My question for the member is simple. Where is the evidence in the past 25 years of the fiscal performance of the Progressive Conservative Party, the Reform Party, the Alliance Party, the new Conservative Party, the Reform Conservative Party or the not so progressive Conservative Party?

[Betty Hinton, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know if I can call that a good question but it is an interesting question so I will try to answer it.

First I will try to explain that Mike Harris and Ernie Eves are provincial legislators. They have nothing to do with the federal level of government. There is a huge difference between a provincial government and the federal government. This House is federal government.

[An hon. member]

Oh, oh.

[Betty Hinton, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson, BC]

Would you like to hear the answer or are you going to yell at me?

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. Marcel Proulx)]

Order, please. May I remind the hon. member to address through the Chair please.

[Betty Hinton, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson, BC]

I am sorry, Mr. Speaker. Having sat in that chair I know better and you would never yell at me. I apologize. The member across the way may have yelled at me, so I will speak to you.

The Progressive Conservative Party is no longer. I can say without hesitation that in this party, the Conservative Party of Canada, there are four members who sat as Progressive Conservatives. The balance of our 98 members have never sat as Progressive Conservatives.

When the member asks me to defend a party I did not belong to, I cannot do that.

On the other side of the House, the Liberal government, there are more than 19 ministers, if I remember correctly who sat under Mr. Chrétien. If the member is talking about something new happening across the way, there is nothing new happening across the way. It is recycling. I am into recycling but not when it comes to politicians and not when it comes to policies.

In the House since the session has begun there has been literally no new legislation that has come forward. The only new things that we have talked about in the House, aside from the budget, which we are talking about now, have actually been from private members' bills.

That is not much of a record that I would stand on, if I were the member. First of all, I did not call the member across the way illegitimate. I would never do that. I do not know where that comment was coming from.

The other thing the member said was that the Canadian people have spoken. Yes, they did. Three-quarters of them did not vote Liberal.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Dewdney—Alouette, BC]

Mr. Speaker, finally we are hearing some common sense. I would have appreciated hearing Liberals defend the bill rather than having them sit cowardly by, asking questions and not having to respond to any.

I am pleased to participate in the debate because it is such a bad bill that we need to draw it to the attention of all Canadians.

I was raised in a good family. We did not have much money. My parents modelled for me what to do when we do not have a lot of money. They called it “budgeting”. It is a pretty simple concept, they said. We figure out what we need to spend and what our income will be and then we carefully plan how we will spend that amount of money. We monitor how fast it is going out and know when to quit and all those good things.

Along the way in my adult life I also served on the boards of a number of non-profit organizations. They never have a lot of money either. There was never any extra money to go around, so we had to do this thing called budgeting. We had to figure out what sort of revenue stream we were going to have and then plan very carefully how we would spend it. Every year we laboured over presenting this thing we called a budget.

It amazes me that this bill is being referred to as a budget of some sort, an add-on budget or additional spending or that kind of thing. If this is a budget, if this is what we are modelling for Canadians, perhaps for young Canadians who are starting a family and want to figure out what a budget is, then they should not look at this because this is not a good idea. The director of a non-profit organization who is considering some sort of model spending plan should not take ideas from this budget, because it is absolutely ridiculous.

If we want to know about budgeting, it would be better to do a Google search because we will come across about 10 million pages to look at and all of them would probably be a better example than this one.

Here is one, for example: a budget is a guide that tells us whether we are going in the direction we want to be headed in financially. We may have goals and dreams, but if we do not set up guidelines for reaching them and we do not measure our progress, we may end up going so far in the wrong direction we can never make it back.

Here is another: a budget lets us control our money instead of our money controlling us. Number three states: a budget will tell us if we are living within our means. Here is another one: a budget can improve our marriage.

[An hon. member]

An NDP-Liberal marriage.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Dewdney—Alouette, BC]

That might be a good one for some of us to consider. It states that a budget helps us sleep better at night because we do not lie awake worrying about how we are going to make ends meet.

Frankly, I do not know how the Liberals can sleep, and I really do not know how the NDP can sleep, having participated in something like this.

A budget is about two things. A budget is about vision. It is about knowing where we want to go and how we will get there. The Conservative Party, for example, believes that we should be aiming for something.

We should be aiming for a high standard of living, maybe the highest in the world. We should be aiming for every Canadian being able to have a job or for economic growth for every region in Canada. Our children should be able to go to post-secondary education, live the Canadian dream and be well prepared for life. Maybe it is part of the Canadian dream that we should have the freedom to start a business.

If Bill C-48 is the Liberal vision, what is behind it is simply survival. It is a vision for survival. It did not appear until very late in the process to save the Liberals' political skin. It was developed in one day. It was done only to win the support of the NDP. The NDP members are perhaps even a little more honest. They say that they got some of their priorities, which they negotiated. It was not about any Liberal priorities as far as I can tell, except the priority that is uppermost in Liberal minds, and that is to survive, to hang on to power.

Some Liberals and certainly the NDP will ask what we do not like in the bill. We have heard this refrain; it is their mantra. They ask us if we do not like the environment. They ask us if we do not like education. They ask us what is the matter with affordable housing and they ask us if we do not like foreign aid. But this is not the vision.

Those things are the not the vision in this document. If they were, why were they not in that first document, the shiny little book that had the glossy cover, the nice pages and good printing? It had the maple leaf on the front. That is what the Liberals called the budget document. It had many pages. It gave some detail and showed some idea of how the money was going to be spent.

If these things were the vision, why not put them in that document? No, they came out late in the game, when the government's survival was in jeopardy.

When they came out with the shiny book, the Liberals said at the time that it could not be cherry-picked. I remember hearing the finance minister say that. I am sure the members across the way will remember that. That budget was thought through. Did the Liberals not have meeting after meeting of the finance committee and hear witness after witness in trying to balance the priorities of Canadians?

They came up with the plan. There were even some good things in it, things that even the Conservative Party can support, and yet at the drop of a hat one day in a hotel room they decided that they could spend $4.5 billion that was not in any way planned and was without accountability mechanisms. That is shameful, in my opinion.

A budget is about management, setting up a spending plan and having measurable outcomes. It is about knowing what the means of accountability are. The Liberals will say we can trust them because they are responsible, as if they are somehow the guardians of Canadian values and fiscal responsibility.

Let us look at their record. The Liberals say they inherited a difficult situation and they had to cut back. In fact, they did cut back on program spending, but in the last five years there has been a 44% increase in program spending. That is not taking into account the additional spending in this bill.

I think the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance is making this play as to whether it is “may” or “might”. He is right: this is about enabling legislation. The word is “may”. It is not “might”. Those are different words in English grammar. This means that the minister or somebody, the governor in council, frankly, has the power. It is about authorization. It is the cabinet. It is the cabinet, if we read the final clauses of the document, that can develop and implement programs and projects. It can enter into agreements with a province, a municipality or any other organization or any person. It can make a grant or contribution or any other payment.

This is sounding vaguely familiar to me, as if this might be leading us somewhere we do not want to go. We are putting this kind of power in the hands of the governor in council, in the hands of the cabinet, with no plan, with no idea of how this might be spent or even whether it will be spent, and with no way of measuring the outcomes. Cabinet is allowed to give funds to any province, organization or any person and can buy shares in any corporation or acquire membership in a corporation. This is a recipe for disaster.

It does not require the government to make the payments. It does not even require that the spending be incremental. It does not say that the government could not take it from spending it had already planned and say it has met its obligations by spending this money in its place.

I have not been in this place long, but I cannot believe that we are actually having to deal with this. I cannot believe it. It is so obvious to me what this is. It is an attempt at vote buying.

Canadians should say that it is unacceptable for Liberals to buy the votes of the NDP for about $240 million a vote. Canadians should say to the NDP members that it is shameful for them to sell their votes to the Liberals for $240 million a vote. It is shameful. I hope Canadians pronounce judgment on this.

All we have is vague promises and no details. As has been said, this is a blank cheque. Don Drummond, the chief economist with TD Financial, said in the National Post on May 7:

For years government has wanted an instrument that would allow it to allocate spending without having to say what it's for. This act will do it.

It almost makes me wonder if this was the Liberals' plan: make it look like they are in jeopardy, go to the NDP and come across with this bill. Now they have this slush fund. Now they can do this vague spending. Who knows where it will go, when it will go and how we will figure it out and measure it? This is what we have in Bill C-48. This needs to be defeated.

[Charles Hubbard, Liberal, Miramichi, NB]

Mr. Speaker, we have had a very good hypothesis here in terms of budgeting, but we all must recognize that in terms of our budget presented in February and the work that the finance committee has done, we have seen a surplus growing because of the strong economy of our country. We have the lowest percentage of unemployment that we have seen in several decades.

We have an opportunity to invest more money in terms of trying to look to the future of this country. I would ask the hon. member a question in terms of those facts. The investment in post-secondary education, the investment in housing, and the investment in public transit, are those investments for the future? As a society, should we think of the less fortunate in overseas countries and offer more assistance with foreign aid? Is he opposed to those concepts?

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Dewdney—Alouette, BC]

Mr. Speaker, earlier the member said that he serves on the finance committee. If he does, he probably has heard about a number of competing issues in the prebudget hearings. I imagine that he heard about all kinds of competing visions and competing priorities for how this money was going to be spent.

I would bet there were some there who made a strong case for lower taxes. I would bet some came before the committee and made a strong case for reducing the debt, for having an actual intentional plan to pay down the debt instead of an accidental contingency plan. I would bet there were a lot of other priorities.

In fact, the government chose some of them. The Liberals presented that budget to us and they left out what is now in Bill C-48. I assume they did it for a very good reason.

[An hon. member]

I doubt it.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Dewdney—Alouette, BC]

Yet when the Liberals were forced to rethink whether they could survive, whether they needed to buy the votes, they came across these things that the NDP told them would make their lives better and they put them in, after all of that good consultation. I do not think they are worried about Canadians' lives being better. It is shameful.

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I have heard a lot of great speeches from this side of the House tonight, but I have to commend my colleague. That was a fantastic speech. I want to commend him for that and for some clear thinking. It is about time we heard some of that. We certainly do not get any from the government side.

If I heard my colleague correctly, what he is really talking about here is a basic philosophical difference. He addressed it when he was answering the Liberal question from across the way just now.

Over there, we have a situation where the Liberals, along with their NDP coalition colleagues, their partners down there, think of a surplus and then dream up some way to spend it.

Over here, we have a philosophical difference because Conservatives actually view a surplus as overtaxation. That is what it is, overtaxation, and it is to be returned to the people it was taken from.

It is not for programs that are dreamed up to spend billions of dollars, to blow that money out the window and waste it on things like the sponsorship scandal, the gun registry, the CAIS agricultural program and the HRDC scandal. I could go on and on. It has been twelve years of waste and mismanagement.

I would like to ask my colleague if he would care to comment on what he is hearing from his constituents about those types of priorities, those types of choices that Canadians want to see their government make for them.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Dewdney—Alouette, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is absolutely right. When there is a surplus, as it is called, it is there because the government has collected more money than it needs, more money than it had planned to spend, even though it might have planned to spend a great deal. When there is a surplus, there are only a few things that can be done with it: we can spend it, pay down debts or give it back.

I know that we get criticized over here for having this ludicrous notion that we should give money back to Canadians. What I call that is investing in real Canadians, putting it back in the pockets of real Canadians so that they can figure out how to spend it.

What would that be like? My constituents would love to have another $1,000 in their pockets every year and they would love to figure out how they are going to spend it. Maybe they would spend it on their own priorities. Maybe they would save it. Maybe they would send their kids to school. Maybe they would start a business. At least they would have a choice, and that, I think, is what my constituents would like the government to do.

[Bonnie Brown, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have heard some complaints from my side of the House about the repetition in the speeches across the way. I must say that I have learned a lot from my Conservative colleagues tonight. I learned that their view of history suggests that their party has always existed. In fact, the group assembled represents a set of parties that we have governed with over 11 and a half years.

We have had the Reform Party, the Progressive Conservative Party, the Alliance Party and now the new Conservative Party. We have faced leaders espousing those theories that those parties put forward. We have had Mr. Manning, the hon. member for Okanagan--Coquihalla, Mr. Charest, Mr. Clark, the hon. member for Central Nova and now the hon. member for Calgary Southwest.

We have faced four parties who have put forward the same theories. They have had six leaders as their spokespersons and yet once again last June Canadians chose not to make it the party that would lead Canada, but again chose the Liberals. I think that this reclarification of history is necessary.

However, I have learned a lot. For example, I have learned that the only example of Conservative high finance that I have heard from that side tonight revolved around the economics of a garage sale. I have learned that the example of Conservative reading material that was quoted from was not Shakespeare or the Bible or any of those books. It was the Salmon Arm News .

Perhaps Canadians are having difficulty connecting with people whose idea of finance is a garage sale and whose idea of literature is the Salmon Arm News . I would also caution one of their members to not take swipes at sailors, even if some of them are drunk because it will not increase his party's success in Atlantic Canada.

The last speaker is a new member. It seems to me that he does not understand minority government. That is the type of government chosen by Canadians in the last election, a government in which no party has a majority. Traditionally, a minority government has a duty to lay out a plan in its Speech from the Throne, to lay out a budget, and to look for support from another party in order to have it passed.

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I have not kept a really close eye on the time, but my understanding was that my hon. colleague had five minutes for questions and answers.

The member had two questions, one of which was from me. I appreciated that opportunity. I think we must be well over the time for the hon. member to put her question.

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. Marcel Proulx)]

The Chair certainly hopes that he is not disturbing anybody. I want to thank the hon. member for reminding me that this is the questions and comments period. The hon. member started her question when there was still some time left in the five minutes for the hon. member. I will ask the hon. member for Oakville to please complete her comments or ask a question.

[Bonnie Brown, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the previous speaker if he understands that while there is not much detail in Bill C-48, it is merely an extension of the original bill which laid out the government's priorities in sufficient detail. The spending priorities in Bill C-48 are simply an extension of those priorities which were outlined in great detail in Bill C-43. It seems to me that it is not necessary to repeat where the money is going to go when we are adding to a list of priorities outlined in the original budget bill.