Mr. Speaker, the sentiment is quite clear. The Prime Minister wants to squash any opposition whatsoever, notwithstanding the fact that he is a minority prime minister and still has not figured out that he got less than 40% of the vote. After all the millions of dollars he spent on advertising, he was able to bump his vote up 2% and a few seats. Still the people of Canada had the good sense to deny him a majority. They have denied him a majority twice now.
The opposition members in the House represent over 60% of the popular vote and 55% of the members in the House.
One person calls the shots in the Conservative Party, and it is the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister only. The rest of the ministers and members of caucus are decoration only. That is it. Therefore, the decision to insert these statements into the economic statement was the Prime Minister's and the Prime Minister's only.
I do not have a very high opinion of the Minister of Finance, but even I do not believe the statements of attack on democracy were inserted by the finance minister. This has created quite a controversy and I want to read part of a column from Margaret Wente in this morning's Globe and Mail.
I know some members have heard this, but it bears repeating. As member know, Margaret Wente is not exactly enamoured with the Liberal Party or any of the other opposition parties. She said, “[The Prime Minister] was supposed to be the steady hand at the helm”. This is a bit of nonsense in and of itself. He never told the Canadian public that we were in deficit and have been in deficit for months now. She went on to say:
But now, even his long-time loyalists whisper that he's lost it. They are right. You can put up with a bully. You can even put up with a paranoid, controlling bully. But a paranoid, controlling bully with catastrophic judgment is another matter.
She said that the insertion of this attack on democracy in the fiscal update was in fact a “catastrophic” error in judgment. She went on to say:
Their leader is a brilliant brain with the emotional intelligence of a 13-year-old. The magnanimity of victory eludes him. He can't seem to shake the simmering resentments of the outsider who knows he's the smartest guy in the room but still can't get respect.
That is what Conservatives' friends are saying.
In the same Globe and Mail this morning Gordon Gibson, another somewhat less than an absolutely friendly person to the Liberal Party of Canada, stated:
—you put one lifeline in place before severing the other...This attempt to cut the funding, however, was petty, vulgar, intemperate, low-down, mean-spirited, nasty, smart-ass, ignoble and sleazy, in every way unworthy of a great political party. And in a way that any voter can understand.
That is what the Conservatives' friends are saying.
I, along with probably everyone else in the House, have been receiving an enormous flood of emails, some in favour of the proposed coalition and some clearly not in favour of the proposed coalition.
When one is in a government controlled by a paranoid bully, who has made a catastrophic error in judgment, the Westminster Parliamentary democracy has a way of dealing with that kind of person. It is called a confidence vote. It is a very simple thing.
From time to time in Westminster parliamentary democracies, there are paranoid bullies who make catastrophic errors in judgment and the system is built to address those issues. However, in this case the paranoid bully with catastrophic errors in judgment is afraid of the House. I guess that is the paranoid part. He is afraid to put the vote.
Today's entire question period could have been ended very easily by a simple statement from the leader of the Conservative Party, the Prime Minister of Canada. He could have said that tonight at 6 o'clock we would vote and the whole thing would go away. One way or another it would go away. But no, the Conservative Party is going to adopt a carpet-bombing initiative between Friday and when this House resumes. The Prime Minister is going to prorogue Parliament.
The entire amount in the Conservative piggy bank is going to be spent on advertising campaigns to convince Canadians that parliamentary democracy should be subverted and that the Prime Minister should be allowed to carry on.
It is a very simple concept. When a prime minister loses the confidence of the House and the prime minister has a minority government, he or she has to get the point. In one way or another a coalition of some kind has to be cobbled together.
I have heard members over the day complain about the separatists. It is highly ironic that for the first two budgets of the Conservative government in the 39th Parliament apparently they were good separatists. They were nice separatists. The Conservatives loved those separatists because those separatists made sure that the government could survive on those two budgets. Now we are in the 40th Parliament and those formerly really good separatists have become bad separatists, nasty people. Those bad separatists are now saying that they have reviewed the fiscal update and for reasons best known to them, they think a coalition form of government would actually serve the interests of Quebec and our nation better than the Conservative government would.
It is kind of interesting and somewhat ironic, and completely hypocritical, that somehow or another just a year or two ago those separatists were really good separatists and now apparently they are bad separatists.
Mr. Speaker, you are a student of history. You know that the Liberal Party is the party of Paul Martin, the party of Jean Chrétien, the party of Frank McKenna, and the party of John Manley. We have a rich heritage. Our coalition partner is the party of Roy Romanow, the party of Tommy Douglas, both of whom in their time were fiscally responsible premiers of Saskatchewan.
It is therefore not an unusual arrangement whereby the parties of those two heritages say, “We have a fiscal mess on our hands and we are headed over a cliff. While the Prime Minister decides to fiddle and Rome burns, we are going to get together and propose to the nation a way out of this mess”. The first thing to do to get out of this mess is to be a touch honest with the numbers; just start with the numbers.
I looked at the fiscal update and there is a projection of a $6 billion deficit. The finance minister said that under no circumstances would he ever be a finance minister that would introduce deficits in this country. Now he is talking about structural deficits. I heard one commentator say that deficits are a little like potato chips: once we eat one, we keep on going and going.
Before we get to the airy-fairy stuff in this economic update, we have a $5.9 billion deficit. In two years the surplus is gone. That is hard to do, and I am amazed that the Conservatives have been able to do it. In two years we have gone from a $13 billion surplus to a $5.9 billion deficit, but the Conservatives do not want to say anything to anybody.
Then we get to the fairy numbers. The fairy numbers follow the $5.9 billion deficit, and the Conservatives talk about effective management of government spending. Apparently until now there has been ineffective management of government spending, but now the Conservatives have religion and there is going to be effective management of government spending. That is really good phrasing and I admire the creativity of the Department of Finance in terms of its ability to put lipstick on a pig, so to speak.
The truth of the matter is that we are going to sell off significant assets in order to cover off the deficit. We are going to sell off about $4.3 billion in assets.
Mr. Speaker, I know you are from Haliburton. It is a nice spot. I like Haliburton. However, most of the folks in Haliburton would not be spending the money from the sale of their house before they even put the “for sale” sign on the house. That is fundamental. There is no set of accounting principles, inside or outside government, that allows us to book a sale of an asset prior to actually putting a “for sale” sign on the asset, or even identifying the sale of the asset. In very simple language, this is spending the proceeds from the sale of the house well before the house has sold.
It would not be all that difficult if the finance minister just admitted that we are in deficit. Why is it that he is incapable of recognizing what the Parliamentary Budget Officer said, which is that the deficit we presently have is a result of the policy decisions that have been made by the Conservative government.
We live in an international economy, but the Parliamentary Budget Officer said that we are in deficit, not because of the difficulties in our local economy and in the international economy, but we are in difficulties because of policy decisions that the Conservative government made. Our Liberal Party has warned the government time and time again that it cannot continue its free-spending ways and reduce its fiscal capacity over and over again without consequences. The direct result, we have said to the government, is that the government is spending itself into a fiscal deficit. Surprise, surprise; we are in a deficit. The finance minister refuses to tell the Canadian public the truth and so we are where we are.
The economy is stalled and we need a fiscal stimulus. Every other country in the world is instituting a fiscal stimulus. The Americans are stimulating their economy by $1,859 billion, which is $1.8 trillion. That is a lot of money. Even China is stimulating its economy by $726 billion and Japan by $341 billion. Canada's idea of a fiscal stimulus is -$4.3 billion.
The Conservative finance minister has said that we will be having zero deficit over the next three years. The reality is that we will have a far more substantial deficit than that.
The Liberal Party of Canada has warned the government time and time again and all we have got for our troubles has been ridicule, a massive advertising campaign to destroy the reputation of the leader of the Liberal Party, but surprise, surprise, the Liberal Party is right, the Conservative Party is wrong, and the nation will suffer.