Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise to speak to this motion. Obviously, I am speaking in favour of the motion ensuring the funding for the Department of Natural Resources.
I understand there are some members of the opposition opposing this motion, the net effect of which would be to cut $64 million from Natural Resources Canada. I just do not think that is the responsible thing to do, considering a number of the very good things that are happening there, which I want to get to in a minute.
We all know that the Prime Minister has recently spoken about Canada emerging as an energy superpower. This is something that the Department of Natural Resources is directly responsible for. We are one of the leaders in oil and gas exploration. We are the largest supplier of uranium around the world. We have renewable energies emerging from wind to solar to tidal.
There are some very exciting things happening in the fields of energy right here in Canada, not to mention that over 900,000 Canadians work directly in resource industries in Canada, from forestry to mining. Trying to take $64 million from this department would have a direct impact on a lot of these programs which support these people.
I should mention that natural resources in our country contribute to $93.4 billion in the balance of trade, and that benefits every single region of this country. Why the opposition parties would want to try to remove this money from the government, and obviously they have their own reasons, really does not make sense.
After 13 years of the previous Liberal government in office, we have seen money being wasted within the government. We witnessed programs like the sponsorship program where the Liberals took, not government money but taxpayers' money, envelopes of cash and distributed it among their party faithful. They funnelled taxpayers' funds through ad agencies and then back to the Liberal Party.
We are making some changes within the Government of Canada across every single department to ensure there is accountability and to ensure that money that is being spent is delivering for Canadians. We are making those changes as we move forward.
I appreciate that there will be times where we do not catch things. We did inherit a culture that had gone right across government. We are working very hard to make these changes. In the first five months in office, our government passed the federal accountability act in the House of Commons to bring accountability into legislation. We put into law the amount of donations that people can make to political parties, and to ensure that the Auditor General, when she is following files, can follow the money trail right to the end so that she can have access to the various agencies.
What did the opposition parties do? What did the old Liberal Party do with this? The legislation was sent to the Senate. The Liberal senators completely rewrote the legislation to their own interests. They dragged it out for months and months, only for us to receive it back in this House in the last few weeks. We were able to turn that legislation around in a few days and send it back to the Senate.
The Canadian people are demanding accountability for every dollar that is spent here in Ottawa. That is something that we have pledged to do and that we are following up on.
This new government has had a number of other successes in this House. We have lowered taxes for every single Canadian. We were able to cut the GST to 6%. That impacted every single Canadian. We were able to introduce the universal child care benefit of $1,200--