--from the riding of the hon. member for Saskatoon—Wanuskewin is to be honoured by this government by having his name put to a new icebreaker. He was a hero of mine when I was a small boy growing up in prairie Saskatchewan. I would love to go on about the constituency of Edmonton--St. Albert, but these are times of great peril, both in the House and in the nation.
This fall Canadians gave the Conservative government a clear mandate to continue taking action on the economy. During a global downturn, the last thing our country needs is for opposition politicians to claim entitlements for tax dollars and ultimately to take power without a mandate from the people.
The benchmark TSX index took a near-record dive Monday, dropping 864 points, or 9.3%. It sustained further losses today. That is a clear indication of the economic incentives we can expect from this proposed coalition government. The investors of Canada got a chance to vote early on this proposal, and they voted it down.
Under the current Prime Minister's leadership, our government was ahead of the curve in anticipating the global economic slowdown. We are and have been injecting billions of dollars in stimulus through tax cuts, investments in roads and bridges, and protection of the banking system.
Our focus is the economy, but the opposition parties have their own priorities. While all Canadians are tightening their belts, they feel entitled to make taxpayers pay for political party staff, for polls and for advertising. They want to replace the elected government just to preserve $17 million worth of entitlements. This is clearly unacceptable for a modern democracy.
This time of difficulty is indeed a great opportunity for us to invest in initiatives that will pay benefits in the long term, especially with regard to correcting the infrastructure backlog that exists across this country. However, we cannot afford to be hasty about it. Canadians chose us because they trust us to be prudent and not desperate.
In addition to the infrastructure investment, there is also a chance in this troubled period to make investments in key Canadian industries. I firmly believe, however, and I think Canadians agree with me, that it would be irresponsible to simply dump money into the coffers of any companies that have run into trouble, just as it would be irresponsible to start building roads and bridges everywhere for the sake of propping up temporary jobs.
Prudent economic management means measuring twice and cutting once. This is why I congratulate the efforts of the hon. industry minister, who has been working diligently on the industry file and requesting that the auto industry come up with detailed restructuring plans. Detailed restructuring plans mean Canadians can be reassured that any of their money directed to the auto industry is an investment in something that is sustainable and that makes Canada stronger in the long term, as opposed to using our money to prop up companies for a short time period, only to face the same scenario a few years and a few billion dollars later.
There has to be more consideration than that. Canadians elected this government because they trust us to act with deliberation and with the long-term well-being of this country in mind when we make these important decisions. They do not expect this government to throw billions of their dollars into anything if it is not going to reap dividends.
The opposition accuses us of failing to act as quickly as other industrial nations. To this I counter that there are two very good reasons for Canada to act with more deliberation and prudence than others.
First, we are in better shape than the other industrialized countries in terms of our economy and our solid banking system. They rushed to inject money into various sectors because those other countries' crises were well under way. We have been growing so robustly over the last three years that with few exceptions, we are not feeling this downturn, except perhaps in the stock market. I would argue that we could easily wait until the end of January before committing to huge investments, so that when we act, we can act with a well-considered plan and not a hasty one.
The second difference between Canada and any other country with which we are compared is that much of our economy is deeply intertwined with our neighbours to the south. This means we cannot act alone if we want to act effectively. The Americans, like us, have just come out of a national election and are in the process of deciding what they are going to do with their stimulus package. It would be irresponsible to risk moving at cross-purposes to American actions.
Among their big decisions is how to help the big three carmakers. Does it make any sense for Canada to decide by itself what to do in this regard? No.
Obviously the U.S. is a central player in our marketplace. Just as obvious, we should work in concert with what happens on the other side of the border and with the incoming American administration.
This is only one example of many interconnected aspects of our economy, which illustrates the point that until the U.S. makes its trillion dollar decisions, we cannot know that we will make effective choices with our billion dollar decisions.
I am here to speak about the fiscal update and I will return to the subject of the economy, because our crisis is about to get much worse.
The latest moves by the opposition are obviously making our good stewardship of the nation's economy, a side issue being replaced by their naked ambition.
Both my Ottawa office and my St. Albert office have been absolutely deluged by Canadians who are outraged by the coalition of the Leader of the Opposition, who has been lured into by a party that wants to make Canada a socialist state and by a party that wants to pull Canada apart. I share the outrage that so many Canadians feel.
It is one thing to say that a coalition government is better for Canada when no party clearly has a mandate from Canadians. However, that is not the case. Just six weeks ago, the people of Canada spoke very clearly. They said quite unambiguously that they did not want the Leader of the Opposition to be prime minister, not now and certainly not in the times of economic instability like the one we are about to face.
We learned soon after this coalition started that the leader of the smallest party in the House, a man who knows he will never be elected by Canadians into government because his NDP views are so out of touch with reality, had been plotting for some time to take over, with the separatists as his co-conspirators.
In the fiscal update the Minister of Finance announced our intention to lead by example in this period, where all Canadians must be prepared to tighten their belts, and proposed that all parties should give up their $1.95 per vote, which was brought in five years ago. When this happened, the opposition parties, especially the Liberal Party, panicked. Why? Because they cannot raise enough money from people donating to them voluntarily. As with most things in society, the members of those parties think the government should spend taxpayer money on their behalf because, ostensibly, the government knows better.
The panic on the part of the Liberals was just the desperation for which the NDP members were waiting. They immediately took the anger and the insecurity of the opposition parties and before the weekend was over, had committed the Leader of the Opposition to this undemocratic plot.
A lot of Canadians and a lot more sober-minded caucus members from the opposition are wondering why exactly he was lured into this unholy pact with the socialists and the separatists. We should not be too surprised since the Leader of the Opposition has two former NDP premiers on his front benches.
Let us consider his motivations for a moment. His unpopularity drove the Liberal Party to its lowest showing ever. Since Confederation, no Liberal leader has been rejected more strongly across the nation than the man who ran the Liberal Party down to 77 seats on October 14. He was humiliated and most of his caucus members held their noses when he announced he would stay on as interim leader until they found someone to lead them in May. Clearly, at this point, he has nothing to lose and he is desperate to do anything that might salvage his reputation.
Canadians see right through this and we cannot allow it go forward. They said in October that they did not want him as their prime minister and when they said it, they meant it. He is desperate to salvage his reputation, but he is selling his soul and also the soul of his party and, sadly, the soul of the Government of Canada to the people who will run our economy into an abyss that will take us decades to recover from and people who will set the cause of national unity back decades. People can call them devils if they want to. I call them socialists and separatists.
Unlike our government, this coalition never told Canadians what it would do if it took office, so we are left to speculate. Let us do that.
The leader of this gang has wild plans about how he can save the world with radical environmental schemes. Today we heard his friend, the leader of the Green Party, in a press conference, crowing that a seat in the Senate, or maybe even something better would await her, if this left-wing coalition ever flies. His green shift is not something he has ever disowned, even though so many of the Liberal candidates disowned it in the recent election campaign.
The NDP and the Bloc also have some extreme views on how we should take whatever steps we can to save the world, no matter what the costs to our economy or to our taxpayers. This is not what Canadians chose, especially in a time of economic crisis.
Not only is this not the direction Canada chose, it is not the direction western Canadians want. There is plenty of outrage in all parts of the country over this, but especially in the west. By getting into bed with people who want to pull Quebec out of Canada, the proposed coalition has given new life to those who have entertained the idea of pulling all parts of Canada apart.
We know perfectly well that the members of the NDP think that the oil sands, which are fuelling not only the energy independence for North America but also the Canadian economy, need to be shut down. We know perfectly well that they think Greenpeace is a more reliable source of information than any provincial government or independent study.
We knew all along that the Liberals green shift, in their uniformed zeal, would hurt the economy of the nation and especially the economies of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Canadians did not vote for that, and they would not vote for it if they were given a chance tomorrow.
Normally, I would be happy about anything that would drag the Liberal name into great depths of unpopularity. However, the stakes are too high for the country I love to let the Liberals go ahead with this dangerous, undemocratic, unprincipled and un-Canadian plot.
Here is what Jeffrey Simpson from The Globe and Mail had to say about the prospect of these three unsuccessful leaders:
If this coalition takes power, therefore, Canada would be led by a temporary prime minister who almost every Liberal MP wishes were not the leader. Not having been successful in leading his own party, it would be fascinating to watch him run a coalition government....It will certainly be a shock to the 74 per cent of Canadians who did not vote Liberal, and the large majority who ranked Mr. Dion by far the least popular leader, to discover that he has somehow managed to become prime minister.
Don Martin of the National Post wrote today that the biggest Liberal loser in—