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.