Yes, a very desperate party doing desperate things.
I just want to pick up on the comments made by my colleagues who suggested that the Liberal Party always does what is in the best interests of Canadians, particularly when it comes to health care. It is something I just cannot leave alone because I am very passionate about protecting our health care system. I understand that Canadians are very concerned about it. Many people are dying while they are on wait lists for health services that they cannot get.
A year ago during the election campaign, we laid out our platform before the Canadian people. It is not about the opposition trying to take down a government that is in power. It is about laying an alternative before the people of Canada so they have the opportunity to discern what is in their best interests. We laid out our health care platform during the election campaign. We indicated the number of dollars that would be needed for health care in the next number of years to sustain it in the short term. Our plan was to make sure that would take place.
The Liberal government did exactly the same thing. The Liberals accused us of having too rich a budget, that we could not afford it, that it was going to break the bank and there was no way in the world that Canada could afford the number of dollars the Conservative Party had suggested. It is interesting. Just think about this. The election was in June and by September we had the 2004 accord. The first ministers sat down with the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister said, “We are going to fix health care for a generation”.
There was no possible way that was going to happen, and it certainly did not. Nonetheless the numbers, the dollar figures that came out of that, which we hear the Liberal government bragging about intently, were not the numbers on which the Liberals went to Canadians last June to ask for a mandate to support health care. The dollar numbers that were actually agreed on were in fact almost identical to the numbers in our budget, which were double the amount of dollars for health care.
We understand that health care is a priority. We understand that people are dying on wait lists. What we cannot understand is a government that over the last decade has pulled $25 billion out of health care.
When the Liberals cooked up a deal with the NDP in order to stay in power, it is interesting that the NDP did not recognize the importance of health care and tried to come up with a way of fixing it, not just for the next decade but for the generation beyond the next 10 years.
The real challenge in health care is not whether it should be a more private or a more public health care. The real challenge is how to sustain it over the next 30 to 40 years as the baby boomer bubble hits our system and, at the same time, understand that when the demand on health care and the amount of money that will have to be put into it will be coming at a time when we will have a diminishing number of taxpayers paying for the service. Therefore we have a significant problem.
We do not have time to play politics with health care any more, as has been happening over the last decade under the Liberal government. It is unbelievable that we see that kind of dishonesty in health care and that kind of dishonesty in budgeting. It is an abomination and it is something that Canadians really have to discern.
I do not think Canadians will be fooled by the government. I do not think they will be fooled by the display of what went on to get Bill C-48 here this evening. They understand that this is a desperate government propped up by a party that has never had an opportunity to do anything and probably never will. The NDP members had an opportunity to stay true to their conscience. They say they are the great defenders of democracy and yet we see what they did. They threw democracy in the air for $4.6 billion. It is an unbelievable situation.
Why I have spent most of my time so far talking about Bill C-48 is because Bill C-48 is not the real issue. The real issue is how we could treat democracy in such a pathetic way and cook up a deal in a hotel room by desperate people trying to stay in power. It is not about Canadians and it is not about the $4.6 billion because after the $4.6 billion what did we see? We saw $26 billion being applied to try to buy off the Canadian public prior to what the Liberals thought was going to be an election.
The Liberals tried to buy off Quebec. They bought off the NDP. They tried to buy off the Canadian electorate. If that was not bad enough, they had to try to buy opposition votes because they needed a few more and they were able to do that by offering and giving power. They not only offer dollars but they offer power.
We ask ourselves why Canadians are so cynical about this place and how politics have deteriorated in this country. I say to everyone in the House that we had better soberly understand and think about what we are trying to do here and who we are trying to support. It is not each other nor is it our parties. It is the people of Canada. Too many times the members of the House forget that. We do it in a matter of days around here. It seems to be a very easy thing to fall into that trap. I think we need to understand that.
Let us look at Bill C-48 and discern what Bill C-48 is actually saying. It talks about $4.6 billion but the dollars are not well planned out and there are no accountability measures. What happens to that money?
The ad scam, one of the reasons that we are here, is a perfect example of what happens. Money was misappropriated and it went to places that it should not have gone to, propping up the Liberal government. We have seen other examples of it with the gun registry. The Liberal government made a promise that Canadians would only pay $2 million for that registry and it is now closer to $2 billion. Submarines are another example of the inappropriate use of money. We have seen HRDC and Shawinigan. We could just go on and on.
We could go into each one of those in detail and perhaps we should just to remind the Canadian public how badly the Liberal government treats the Canadian purse when it starts doing these one-offs without any accountability measures. If we want to add some confidence of the Canadian public in this House that has to stop.
This House has a long history of serving the country, which is one of the greatest countries in the world, but it should not be one of the greatest, it should be the greatest. No country in the world has the amount of resources and wealth that Canada has with a population of 32 million. We should be leading the nation in every sector and in every way. We should be an example of how a country should be run. In some ways we do it in spite of the government because we have lots to be proud of, but we could be so much more and so much better. It is a shame that we have to run a government the way we have and the way we are doing it under this piece of legislation.
What we are talking about here is money. Let us look at some of the priorities of the NDP when it was prepared to sell its soul. The number one issue in my riding and from coast to coast is agriculture. I do not know where the NDP votes are really coming from or why it is not thinking of the Canadian people, but the number one issue in my riding is agriculture. The BSE issue has hit them in a way that has never hit the agriculture industry before.
In my riding it is doubly bad because there were two years of drought and grasshopper problems and on top of that they have now had two years of the BSE crisis. Farmers are in suicidal situations. Many of them are visiting my office and many of them are calling. It is an unbelievable situation in agriculture and the NDP cooks up what it says is a deal of a lifetime and forgets to even think about what is actually happening with the number one issue in the country with regard to a serious crisis situation.
The Liberal government has also failed the agricultural community. In budget after budget we have seen its priorities and the message it is sending to the farmers and producers is that they should get out of agriculture. That has to stop. We do not understand just how serious a situation it is and how important it is to be able to support it.
We all realized that this was a cooked up budget for all the wrong reasons but it was there. What were we going to do about it? When it got into committee we tried to address some of the concerns. We wanted to put some sanity around it. We tried to put a plan in place so that the government would at least be responsible enough, even though it was going to spend the money, to ensure the money would be applied in an appropriate way. That sounded reasonable to me and it makes no sense whatsoever why the Liberals failed to do that.
When it comes to accountability for that money, there needs to be a plan and some accountability measures around it or we will see the same kind of misuse of funds that we have seen in many of these other programs.
The first change we requested was to clause 2 and accountability was in clause 3. In clause 1 we wanted to make sure the government did not forget that it had a $500 billion debt load. We wanted the government to understand that the debt had to be dealt with or we would be dealing with some serious problems down the road because the economy does not usually go straight up. It usually has some bumps along the way. A good, prudent manager would understand that something like that would happen.
Not only that, a good, prudent manager would have a slush fund, which we have. It is a $4 billion slush fund. However the NDP deal took half of that away and now the slush fund is only $2 billion. We are sitting on dangerous ground and we are being asked to come into this House and support it. We are asked to come in here and debate it in the wee hours of the evening and try to come up with a reason why we should support a budget that would do this to the tax purse of the Canadian public. There is no reason that I can think of and it is an absolutely unbelievable thing.
Not only did this cooked up deal take the $4.6 billion out of it but it also tried to eliminate the tax reductions. We know that if the government can apply $26 billion to it, it also has extra money.
In closing, I would like to move:
That the motion be amended by adding:
And the committee report back no later than December 16, 2005.