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.