Mr. Speaker, I apologize. I can see, extensively, why the members opposite do not want that name mentioned, even if it is in a quote. I accept your point.
Through his economic statement, the finance minister shows that he is a stranger to the truth. In his economic statement, the Minister of Finance, as Don Martin said, fudged the numbers to a great extent.
I will now turn to James Bagnall who also wrote an article in The Ottawa Citizen on Friday. He stated:
Such is Canada's strength among the G7 nations that [the Minister of Finance] is forgoing a significant boost to spending on roads and other public works projects, thought necessary by some to offset the deterioration in economic growth.
He went on to say:
In view of the financial turmoil in other countries, it is a remarkable record. And it would be nice to see [the Minister of Finance] give credit where due. Canada's solvency owes a great deal to Jean Chrétien's Liberal government. Because Chrétien acted in the mid-1990s, [the Minister of Finance] has a range of options to combat a declining economy. [The current leader of the official opposition's] Liberals and the rest of the Opposition in Parliament are angry he is not taking advantage of them.
He is talking about the foundation that is due to a previous prime minister and his minister of finance.
Mr. Bagnall goes on to state:
By 2008, federal debt levels had tumbled more than $100 billion. The government is now paying about $30 billion per year on interest payments compared with $46 billion in 1995.
Canada's books are solid at the right time.
However, the Minister of Finance failed to recognize why that is so. Later in my remarks I will point out that not only did the government have a good financial foundation in the beginning, it undermined that financial foundation regardless of the propaganda that has been spun today by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister when he said that it was their good management of the economy that got them to this stage with decent fundamentals.
The fact is that the decent fundamentals were, as is stated in James Bagnall's article,:
Canada's solvency owes a great deal to Jean Chrétien's Liberal government. Because Chrétien acted in the mid-1990s, [The current finance minister] has a range of options to combat a declining economy.
That is what the Minister of Finance should have done. He had a solid foundation. He had a fiscal capacity turned over to him by the previous government. He failed to seize on that capacity and instead played the ideology game. He attacked public servants, pay equity and political dissent in the country, and failed to bring in an economic stimulus package when the ability to do it was in this country better than any other country in the world.
I want to be clear in terms of what the Minister of Finance did. In this particular economic statement, the finance minister is a stranger to the truth. In terms of the way this action unfolds, the Prime Minister, through his actions, has shown that he is a Prime Minister who cannot be trusted.
However, today, the Prime Minister tries to buy time and put his propaganda machine into full gear, attacking the idea of a coalition and worse, fabricating the history of how our financial position got to where it is, more stable than other countries in the world. Let me put it this way. Over the last two years, the Prime Minister and the Conservative government have managed to move Canada from being the financial envy of the industrialized world to being on the brink of deficit financing.
What concerns me about the economic statement is that when we go through it, we find that he is projecting small surpluses out into the future, but how is the Minister of Finance projecting that into the future? They are going to sell off some Canadian assets. When we ask officials what Canadians assets are going to be sold to get to that $2.6 billion, which happens to match the amount that they need to show a surplus, they cannot say.
Was the Prime Minister right during the election that this is a good time to buy? Is the Minister of Finance saying to the rest of the world, “Come to Canada. The auctioneer is the current Prime Minister and we will sell off the people's assets?” They are not the government's assets. They are the people's assets that the Prime Minister is saying he will sell to show a fictional surplus in the budget through his Minister of Finance's economic statement, at fire sale prices.
Now is the time for honesty. Now is the time for the government to be straightforward and lay out its fiscal position, admit to the fact that it has the biggest spending budget in Canadian history, and that taking about $12 billion annually through the GST cut did nothing to stimulate the economy. We are seeing the effects of that. What it sure did was take away the ability of the federal government to do what it ought to do for Canadians in a time of economic turmoil.
In two years, we have moved from being a strong, central government in this country, holding the financial resources to assist in troubled times, to a weakened centre with the cupboards bare.
Why did the Minister of Finance not, in his economic statement, admit to that fact? We could have accepted that. That is the reality. This is the time for government and leadership to be honest and straightforward with the fiscal position of the country. We have to assist Canadians in terms of economic stimulus and other programs, to assist our forestry, manufacturing, automotive and farming industries, and to assist our seniors in terms of their pensions. That is what needs to be done and the government has failed in the statement. Whether the direction came from the Prime Minister or straight from the Minister of Finance, I do not know, but what the government tried to do was misrepresent the numbers, play politics, and drive ideology over good economic common sense.
We know that this particular Minister of Finance has a record elsewhere, and the province of Ontario has suffered because of the minister’s record in that province. I as a parliamentarian and Canadian do not want to see this Minister of Finance do to Canada what he did to Ontario. That is why the opposition parties are challenging the government in terms of its lack of stimulus and co-operation. The government does not even seem to care if it breaks the law on that side of the House. I spoke on that point in a point of privilege on Thursday morning.
The member says I am looking pathetic. Is there just no law? Is there nothing the government on that side will not do? It cannot even allow democracy to work in terms of elections within farm organizations. It has to try to influence it using franking privileges of the House. Mr. Speaker, that question of privilege is before you. My point is, just like the financial statement in which it fudged the numbers, no law seems to matter in other areas as long as the Prime Minister gets his ideological point of view.
The fact of the matter is, with this economic statement, no longer do we have the prudent planning with financial reserves to partner with industry and provincial governments to fight issues and dilemmas as we did in the past, as we did with SARS, BSE and other issues. Now, we have a global economic crisis that is impacting Canada. It is strange how the Prime Minister finally seemed to realize that after the election, but would not admit it before. The difficulty is that the Government of Canada has been weakening our ability with our financial reserves to be able to take on those challenges all along. Now, when the government has an opportunity in its economic statement to come clean and give this place the right numbers, the honest numbers so that we know what we were dealing with, it fabricates them to a great extent.
In two short years, we have seen the government undermine our opportunities. As I indicated, we have seen a lot of propaganda coming out from the government this weekend, and that will be the kind of game I think it will play over the coming weeks.
Let me close by saying that the government has brought forward a fiscal update that has demonstrated that it clearly has no understanding of nor interest in the growing economic crisis which all other industrialized countries have been responding to and responding to aggressively.
The Minister of Finance claims that he can maintain a surplus in the face of this crisis and that, to put it mildly, is a deception. Conservatives ran up a $6 billion deficit and are using it as an excuse to make ideological cuts to essential government services, sell government assets, and cut the paycheques of public servants. It did not have to be this way.
The Minister of Finance could have been honest and clear, put forward an economic stimulus package, co-operate with leadership in the G20 as he claimed he would do and did not, co-operate with the premiers as he claimed he would do and did not, and co-operate with the parties in the House which in the throne speech the Prime Minister claimed he would do. It is a sad day when we have this kind of economic statement and ideological agenda put forward by the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance, when we know it could have been so different.
The bottom line is that the Prime Minister has clearly lost trust with us in the House over this measure and I believe he has lost trust with Canadians. It could have been so different.