Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak against Bill C-48.
I have heard a number of members in the House accuse the Conservative Party of not standing up for the homeless and for education. I want to make it absolutely clear that is completely misleading.
The issue before us today is a budget that was written on the back of a napkin in a hotel room somewhere in downtown Toronto with the perfunctory minister of finance, Mr. Buzz Hargove. It is difficult to understand who exactly is running the finances of the country when in fact billions and billions of dollars are spent just like that.
Without a plan we cannot vote for the spending of hard-earned taxpayers' dollars. The Conservative Party believes that the federal government should be the overseer and the protector of the funds that people lean on us to make decisions regarding.
The federal government should be responsible for things like international trade, the military, protecting the country's borders, but the Liberal government seems to want to interfere in every aspect of Canadian life.
The government wants to educate our children the way it feels it can do because it knows that parents cannot possibly raise their own children. The government wants to interfere with the family. It wants to tell us how to define our relationships and which relationships to have. It wants to interfere with the rights of religious freedoms.
The Prime Minister actually wants to be the premier of every province and the mayor of every city. The Conservative Party does not feel that is any way a federal government should operate.
The goal of the Conservative Party is it would like to see Canada in the highest of standards around the world. We believe that all Canadians who want a job should actually be able to get a job. We believe that Canadians should enjoy the economic growth that is the envy of the world. We have everything that we need to do exactly that, except a government with leadership.
We believe that moms and pops should go to bed every night knowing full well and feeling secure that their children will have access to a Canadian dream, any dream, a dream that I have not heard from the government in a decade, certainly not since I have been in the House representing my community of Cambridge.
We believe that children should be allowed a great secondary education, not just announcements, but action, a plan. We believe that they should have some money left to save for their retirement, not be robbed all their lives of their hard-earned dollars. Maybe, just maybe it is a dream, but just maybe they could have a little bit left over for skates or a one week summer vacation for their children. But no. What we see is a government that is so ramped on taxation that two people out of every family work, one of them just to pay the taxes for that family.
We feel very strongly that the social needs of Canadians must be met. We need to be responsible and recognize that there are Canadians who are less fortunate than we are.
However, approving the reckless spending, the unplanned and unchartered spending of $4.6 billion is not the way to do that. There is no adequate plan on a piece of paper that is not more than a page and a half long. Somehow it is about $200 million to $300 million per word.
Frankly, to be quite honest, it is not only irresponsible, it is actually very cruel to continue to make announcements without a plan or probably without any intentions of following through.
I would like to discuss what happens when the government makes spending announcements without any plan. The first thing that comes to mind is the knee-jerk reaction of let us get into spending money on a gun registry.
A plan would be what we saw with our cattle. We can register 40 million cows for $8 million, but apparently it takes almost $2 billion to register seven million long guns. We are talking long guns, because registration of hand guns has been around since 1935 and it has not done anything to resolve the shootings in downtown Toronto.
I do not know that there are duck hunters in downtown Toronto causing all that violence. I suspect that those firearms are hand guns that have been registered forever. Where are they coming from? They are coming across the border at the 200-plus border crossings without any security whatsoever. The government calls that smart borders; I call it completely inane.
What about the knee-jerk reaction at Davis Inlet? At Davis Inlet we saw children sniffing gasoline. The media reported it. It became a public outcry, which it should have been, but without a plan, what did the government do? It approved the spending of what amounted to approximately $400,000 to move those children, and what else? To move the problem. There were no solutions, just taxpayers' money. We need solutions, not announcements.
Nobody would build a house without a plan. What a disaster that would be to start digging the hole first, not even knowing what size the house would be and not even knowing how many bathrooms were needed, just a blank cheque. Canadians cannot afford that kind of lack of planning.
Probably the most known one is the sponsorship scandal. Some of my colleagues suggest that was not without a plan. There was a plan to funnel and launder taxpayers' money into the Liberal friendly coffers. Maybe that is true, but frankly, the plan was a knee-jerk reaction to get money somewhere and it ended up somewhere else.
We talk about infrastructure right now. The last time the Liberals put $6 billion into infrastructure was into something called the Canadian infrastructure works program at the beginning of the Chrétien government. Since we are going back into history, I know the questions I will get asked will be something about past spending in some government. We are not talking about history. We are talking about saving Canadians' dollars by controlling the fiscal recklessness of the government.
I hate to break it to the members opposite, but we cannot change history. Let us move forward. Let us do something different, because what they have been doing for the last decade has not been working. We have record lineups, but we have $41 billion announced for health care. Nothing has changed. Lineups have not changed.
What do we have in the Canadian infrastructure works program? We have $6 billion, and a lot of that money went toward private hockey arenas. It went toward bocce courts. Do not ask me if I have anything against bocce courts. That is just political rhetoric. Of course I do not. What I have a concern about is spending taxpayers' dollars in areas in which they were not designed to go.
The Conservative Party has nothing against the homeless, absolutely nothing. They need to be helped. They need our help. We have a problem with putting $1.6 billion into a program and not ending up with any extra beds. We have a problem with a program that has 97% administrative costs. How long does the government think that we will sit on this side of the House and give it a blank cheque to continue with its irresponsible spending habits? It stops now. Frankly, the buck stops here. We cannot vote for such reckless spending.
In my community of Cambridge, we have social programs like the Bridges and Cara's Hope. These are programs that are not funded in any way by the government, because the Liberals have too much money to blow on reckless spending.
We would like that the government get down to the business of making a plan, just as normal Canadians would have to do, and spending money on that plan. That is how we get a dollar for a dollar.