Which turned up nothing.
Let us talk about estimating budget surpluses. “Oh, yes, we can do a better job”, the Prime Minister said, “We will estimate them properly”. It turns out he was wrong. When he was questioned on that, what was his response? “Trust us, we tried harder”. Did he try as hard as he did on climate change? I think so.
Child care is another good one. The government said, “We will cancel deals with the provinces” -- that is cooperative federalism -- “We will cancel deals with the provinces and create through the private sector 125,000 private child care spaces”. The Minister of Human Resources and Social Development a couple of weeks ago said, “Excuse me. I don't think it will be possible. I apologize. We tried really hard but it is not going to be possible”. That is another unfulfilled promise.
Let us look at the court challenges program. Here is a government that really cares about minority linguistic rights in this country. A program that helps francophone minorities outside of Quebec to fight for their charter rights, a program that helps the anglophone minority in Quebec, a great portion of which I represent, fight for their rights is gone. Why? Because the court challenges program was used to defeat a court case that the Prime Minister was involved in when he was head of the National Citizens Coalition. We know the Prime Minister likes personal vendettas and this is another example of a personal vendetta.
On Afghanistan, the Prime Minister himself admitted that he rushed the last vote. The Prime Minister is doing a lot of mea culpas. He rushed the last vote and got what he wanted, which was an extension until 2009, but whoops, I think it will be 2011. Members may recall the Liberal defence critic telling the government that it did not really mean 2009, that it meant 2011. The defense minister at the time said that the government meant 2009. Who is correct now?
I hope Tom Flanagan is not the person advising the PM on these issues. If he is, I suggest that the Prime Minister ask for his money back.
The throne speech is nicely packaged. The cover features a boy waving a flag and looking out to sea. There is no doubt it is in Newfoundland, which means he will probably be voting Liberal in the next election if he can vote. The sea stretches to the horizon and beyond. There is water everywhere. The photo is perhaps a bit misleading because it suggests that Canada is in possession of an over-abundance of water, which is not the case. We only have 7% of the world's renewable freshwater to go with the 7% of the land mass that we occupy.
The photo is misleading in another way. It suggests that the government cares about water. Members may recall that I tabled a motion about a year ago calling on the government to produce a national water strategy. No doubt the government and its researchers and policy advisers read the order paper six months later and said that the motion was a good idea so it should be put in the budget. There was passing reference in the budget to creating a national water strategy.
I expected great things in this throne speech. There is very little mention of water in this speech. As a matter of fact, the Kingston Whig-Standard yesterday had a headline reading, “Conservative water strategy still murky following speech”. All we heard about water in this throne speech is a repetition of a couple of promises in the budget speech to do a bit more for the Great Lakes, but still not as much as what we had in our election platform.
The throne speech is a very thin document. It will require some work. We will see if the government can do better when it has to table the details of this speech. Essentially, we have served notice on the government that it gets a passing grade on this, but barely. It has to do better on the mid-term.