Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to address Bill C-48.
I want to say at the outset that the Conservative Party of Canada believes that Canada can do so much better than we have done up until now. We are a land that is blessed with tremendous resources. We have access to the richest market in the history of the world and yet our standard of living languishes. Too many people cannot find jobs today or, if they can find a job, they are not the types of jobs that can pay them a wage that allows them to look after their families and ensure that they can send their children off to university. We think we can do a lot better and that is why we are so opposed to Bill C-48.
We think Bill C-48 represents a government that has completely lost its vision, if it ever had any vision. We argue that there is a much better way to proceed, which I will speak to in a few minutes.
I want to say a little about Bill C-48 at the outset. We need to correct the record about some of the things that my hon. friend has said. I think he is completely misleading Canadians about how this came about, about the nature of Bill C-48 and the nature of the spending that is planned in Bill C-48.
I want to remind my friend across the way that when the budget came in back in February there were a number of things in it that our party supported and some things on which we had some concerns but on balance we found it supportable. We did want to change some things and ultimately we got some of those changes.
We received some of the tax relief that we had been seeking but it was very minimal. After we had pushed the government quite hard, Canadians will receive $16 in personal income tax relief, which, I agree, is not very much. In fact it is a lot less than the millions of dollars that Liberal friends received through the sponsorship scandal in paper bags passed across tables at restaurants and suitcases full of money, but nevertheless we felt that the government was moving a little in our direction.
One of the key elements of Bill C-43, the budget legislation that came down, was a commitment to cut the taxation on large employers. We have been pushing for this for some time because that kind of tax reduction is important to ensuring that the productivity of Canada improves. When productivity improves it means that businesses can hire more workers, they attract more investment, more jobs are created and, as a result of that, more revenue starts coming in to the government. We really pushed that and we were happy to see that the government was doing that, although it was too far down the road.
We have this big productivity challenge in front of us today and the government wants to delay bringing in this tax relief for large employers, even though we face huge challenges today from countries like China, soon India, and basically every other country in the world. We are facing some big challenges but we said that it was okay because at least the government was moving roughly in the right direction.
We had some concerns about some of the environmental provisions of the bill. Part 15 of the bill dealt with regulating large final emitters for companies that emit CO
2
. The government wanted to do that through CEPA, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. We did not like that and just about every party in the House thought that was a bad idea and argued that should not be done. However the good news is that we were able to get some amendments to Bill C-43. We got rid of the CEPA provisions. We were able to make some other changes to greenhouse gas technology funds that made sure it was a little more flexible so that businesses could use it and make it work for them.
We got some changes when it came to transparency on Bill C-43 and ultimately we did support Bill C-43, as the member knows. It is not perfect and it is a long way from perfect. It is not what a Conservative government would do. It is a tepid approach, in our view, but it is a step in the right direction and we did support it.
However, where we thought the government went way off the rails was on Bill C-48. I want to remind the parliamentary secretary that there were NDP members standing in this place until a day or two before the Prime Minister and the leader of the NDP met in a hotel room in Toronto with Buzz Hargrove, the union leader, to cut a deal that was a long way away from this place and from the scrutiny of Canadians. In fact, it was a political deal. It was cut because the government was worried that it would fall with the revelations that were coming out of the Gomery commission, revelations that shook the faith of the country in this government.
Guess what? Despite what the finance minister had been saying in this place about how what the NDP was proposing was outrageous and that “You can’t go on stripping away piece by piece by piece of the budget...You can’t...begin to cherry pick”, two days later his Prime Minister cut a deal with the leader of the NDP to save the hide of the Liberal Party. It was facing these unbelievable charges coming from executives within the Liberal Party talking about millions of dollars being passed to ad executives in suitcases and in paper bags. It was outrageous.
The NDP supported a corrupt government, the most corrupt government in the history of the country, in order to get what it wanted. That is how this all came about, in case people forget. I wanted to set the record straight.
The problems with Bill C-48 go way beyond that. I want to address some of those issues right now.
When the budget came down, the government argued that it needed to have a particular fiscal framework to ensure that we had stability down the road. It wanted to make sure that there was always enough money to ensure that the country did not go into deficit and that there was a minimal amount of money that would go toward debt repayment, which is a good idea. In fact, our party has always supported that, as did the Liberal Party until it struck its deal with the NDP.
In striking that deal, the Liberals took the minimum amount of money that would be used as a buffer to ensure that they did not go into a deficit and if it was not used it would go toward debt repayment. They took it from $4 billion and now it is down to $2 billion under Bill C-48. What does that mean? It means that the amount of money that is used to retire debt is less now, meaning that down the road we will pay more in interest. We will not have the same kind of savings that we would have had if we still had that $4 billion cushion.
I want members in the House to think about what that means. It means that for every $1 billion that we pay toward the debt, and let us assume the interest rate is at 3%, we would save $30 million a year in perpetuity from now until forever. If we were to pay down $2 billion, like the government is now proposing since it struck its deal with the NDP, that would be $60 million in perpetuity that we could be using to fund things like social programs down the road.
I see my friends in the NDP are very agitated about this but I think I am telling the truth about this. I think they are concerned that I am revealing how damaging their deal is to the social safety net of this country, which they should be concerned about because it is damaging.
My point is that the difference between $4 billion and $2 billion means tens of millions of dollars a year cannot now be used to fund social programs down the road, especially when Canadians who are starting to age today, the baby boom generation, hit their retirement years. We expect that when we hit around the year 2030 we will have double the number of seniors than we have today. What will we do then with a much smaller tax base to fund all those seniors? One thing we could do is pay down the debt so that we have more capacity down the road to fund big social programs like health care and seniors pensions.
We are making a grave error. We are making the error of political expediency. The government is selling out the country today to save its own political hide. It is putting the pensions and the health care of seniors at risk down the road. That is what this amounts to and it is reprehensible. That is what the government has done.
There are more problems with Bill C-48. One of the big problems with Bill C-48 can be seen when one picks it up. I do not have a copy of it here, but it is two pages long, a bill that is spending $4.6 billion. One would expect that when talking about amending a budget to include an expenditure of $4.6 billion, one would get a document that not only laid out exactly where the spending would occur, but what the objectives are, what the government intends to accomplish, the mechanisms it would use to accomplish the objectives, and the safeguards in place to guarantee that the money would not be misspent. That is what one would expect when talking about an expenditure of this magnitude, but that is not what we got. We got a 400 word bill. It is one of the most pathetic pieces of legislation I have ever seen in my life.
I see my NDP friend over there wagging his finger at me, criticizing me. Well, let me address one of my concerns when it comes to this issue. In this legislation the government is proposing to spend money on post-secondary education, which is laudable. We all want to do that, but we want to do it in a way we can afford so that down the road we can ensure that we can do it for all Canadians, not just in the short term for the political gain of the Liberals and the NDP.
One of the things that my friend from Portage--Lisgar raised was that in 2000 the Auditor General raised concerns about spending on post-secondary education for aboriginals. This was in the year 2000. In the fall of 2004, the Auditor General said that four years earlier her department had raised those concerns and it still had not had a response from the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs about how the money was being spent. Now the government wants to spend $1.5 billion on post-secondary education, some of which would go to the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs for post-secondary education for aboriginals. The Auditor General still has not received a response, but those members do not care. They do not care that the Auditor General of Canada has grave concerns about the accountability of this money.
The NDP wants to go ahead and spend that money without having that response from the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. The Liberals, of course, do not care. They never have cared about these things. That is why we have problems like the sponsorship scandal. That is why we have problems like the firearms registry.
Frankly, it is why we have problems like one of the worst scandals I think I have ever seen in Indian affairs, which was the whole issue of Davis Inlet. I know that Liberal members and certainly the NDP equate how much one spends with how much one cares. The more money one spends, the bigger one's heart. That is the view of those members. It is not about results for them; it is about how much money they spend. There is no better example that I can provide than how the government handled the problem at Davis Inlet.
I want to remind people in the House and people who are watching this today what occurred. We were all horrified as a country when we saw on television young native children staggering around under the influence of gasoline that they had been sniffing. The prime minister of the day, Jean Chrétien, was horrified. We all were. It was unbelievable that in a country that provides opportunities to so many people, those people at Davis Inlet did not have that opportunity. We saw this absolute social pathology at Davis Inlet, where so many young people basically were throwing away their lives because they were doing this. What was the government's response? The government's response was to throw bags of money at the problem.
Anyone who doubts for a second that is true only has to look at what happened to Davis Inlet after the government intervened. What happened was the government spent $360 million on Davis Inlet, a community of 900 people, which amounts to $400,000 a person. The government moved the whole community down the road, and put the people in new housing and provided new facilities for them, water and all the rest of it.
Predictably, all of the problems went with those people, because the government equates how much money it spends with how much it cares. It equates how much money it spends with getting results and the two are not necessarily connected. The Liberals had no plan on how to spend that money to ensure they got results. The result was that those 900 people took all their problems and misery with them 20 miles down the road and they are in the same position today. That is a disgrace.
We will replicate that, I am afraid, with the NDP budget Bill C-48, because the government is moving forward at lightspeed on this with no plan. There is not one detail in the bill as to how the money will be spent. It just says it will go into certain areas. The government did not list the programs. It did not lay out the objectives. We don't know precisely how much the government wants to spend in each particular area. What the Liberals want to do, and the NDP members are prepared to go along with it, is they want to give authority to the governor in council, in other words to give broad authority to cabinet, to decide how the money is spent.
The Conservative Party moved amendments asking that the government provide plans, and I do not understand why it would not agree to it, by December 31 of this year, laying out how the money would be spent. It did not seem to be a very high hurdle to jump over, but the government could not even agree to that. It would not even accept that amendment. I am horrified that the Liberals would not do that when we are talking about such a major expenditure.
I am running out of time and there are a couple of more things I want to say. There is a better approach. The better approach is to figure out what we want to achieve and make sure that we have programs in place that help people realize their dreams. A lot of times it is not the government that does it. A lot of times it is families that do it.
Let us leave that money, where we possibly can, in the pockets of families. Families know better what is right for them and their children than bureaucrats and politicians do. When there is a doubt about what to do with $4.6 billion that the government has lying around, leave it in the pockets of Canadian taxpayers. They will use it wisely.
My time is running out, so I had better get down to business and move this amendment. I move:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following therefor:
Bill C-48, An Act to authorize the Minister of Finance to make certain payments, be not now read a third time, but be referred back to the Standing Committee on Finance for the purpose of reconsidering all of its clauses with the view to incorporate recommendations regarding tighter controls on discretionary spending.