Mr. Speaker, before I begin my remarks, I must say that it will be my pleasure to split my time with my colleague, the member for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound.
There are various ways to approach a prebudget consultation in a prebudget speech. One can roll out a series of economic facts. One can talk about certain specifics or one can lay out certain principles and backgrounds and begin to develop what one thinks. I think that both methods are positive. Both methods have their strengths.
Having listened to a number of my colleagues go into specifics today, I thought I would concentrate more on a general aspect of laying out my philosophy, my background and where I come from so that the voters of Saskatoon—Humboldt, the people I represent, could better understand where I come from on a principles basis, so they could understand what their representative thinks, what goes into his deliberations, and why he comes to certain perspectives when he casts his vote. I hope that my colleagues will bear with me as I take a slightly different approach.
I would first like to lay out for my electorate and the population at large my background so that they might know my bio. I come from a very middle class family. My dad was a farmer. He has an education degree and taught for a while before going back to his first love. My mom is the local town librarian back home. We were not by any stretch of the imagination a rich or wealthy family.
So when I went off to the University of Saskatchewan, from which I ended up graduating with degrees in geophysics and economics, I did not have some major trust fund or any great amount of wealth to support me. I think this was very good for my education and for my background in understanding basic economics.
To pay my way through university, to be able to afford to go and have the privilege to earn some degrees at the university to provide for my future and to help with my education, I had to work each summer. I had to get down and do physical labour and do something that helped to build and mould my character.
In particular, I ended up working at a couple of different places. I worked at Good Spirit camp as the manager, chopping wood and managing the store. There I learned about fiscal responsibility. I also worked at tree planting for three summers in B.C., which was very important for my practical economic understanding. While the theory of economics was wonderful in the classroom, piecework tree planting is very good for practical economics. I understood very quickly that if one did not plant that tree and do it right, one did not get paid. There was a direct and immediate correlation and responsibility between the work one had done and the payment. I had the privilege of receiving that paycheque only for what I did and was responsible for.
I value those summers because they taught me about responsibility and valuing money, things that I think are sometimes lost today on people who do not come from a background where they are forced to address those questions directly.
Before I begin to speak today, I note that those are the experiences I come from. I took those prejudices and that background and began to apply them to my general principles approach as to how we should do our budget deliberations.
Based on that background, I began to work through my principles. First and foremost, in regard to all the expenditures of all the money that we receive from the people of Canada, we as parliamentarians must consider that it is not our money. It is not the government's money.
It is the money of the people of Canada. They individually worked for it by the sweat of their brow. It was their effort. It was their initiative that caused the creation of wealth. We only hold it for them in trust. This is a trust that we must hold in higher regard than we hold our personal finances. I think we must remember that in regard to every penny we spend in budget 2008 someone worked for it, someone sacrificed and someone made decisions to try to create that wealth.
Therefore, instead of having the government come to this with the assumption that we have the right to spend the money, that it is ours to decide, we as the government and as members of Parliament should be required to justify each and every expenditure.
We should be able to say in regard to each year's budget that every penny was well spent. We should go through them over and over again. Just because program spending was appropriate in one year does not mean that we should continue it in a future year.
We must continue to justify to the voters, the electorate and the citizens of Canada that their money needs to go to whatever programs we put into the budget, because it is ultimately theirs and we only hold it in trust. It is not our right to decide what to do. We only get that right as it is given to us by the voters and only in trust.
If we are to hold that wealth from our voters in trust, it must be required that whatever expenditures we make, we do them with the utmost efficiency and for the creation of more wealth, not less. We must use government expenditures to create more opportunity to create services that cannot be provided through other means, and we must use those services with maximum efficiency. We must not waste money in any way, shape or form.
With those basic principles underlined, we look to history to see where they have been best applied, where governments have held money most in trust, and where have they gone out and applied these principles in an economic fashion with the greatest efficiency.
We can see that very clearly throughout history this has been best applied by government administrations that have applied some basic principles. They are governments that have emphasized free markets, not a collectivistic approach. They are governments that have supported free trade rather than a mercantilist style of approach, one that would hoard for an elite and keep a country looking inward instead of using the economic efficiencies of the entire world. This means a government policy that uses the currency as a means of trade and not as a means of manipulation for the power of the state to tax through inflation.
With those historical premises and the philosophical understanding, how do we then begin to apply that to what we have? I think the government has been quite good at applying those basic principles.
First of all, we have paid down the debt that was built up and which was predominantly a legacy of the Trudeau administration in our history, with some other administrations also sharing lesser degrees of blame. We have paid down the debt by $37 billion and will continue to pay down that debt by a minimum of $3 billion more per year. That is wise and prudent management of the public finances, because that debt is taxation for the future. It was caused by irresponsible and wasteful squandering by previous administrations.
Second, we have emphasized lower taxes, because again it is back to that principle: we hold the money in trust. While there have been criticisms of certain specific tax cuts, I know of no tax cut that is a bad tax cut. They are all good.
I must say that I am proud of the government's business tax cuts. While certain parties in the House may sharply criticize corporations, they do not criticize the investments in things, which teachers, farmers and workers across the country receive from these corporations in the forms of dividends and appreciated stock value. It is people's retirement that is being boosted as these companies are being supported.
Most notably, we have also dropped the GST by two full percentage points. Again the opposition criticizes us, although there is a certain degree of irony since two of the parties that were around at that time were harshly critical of it when it was first implemented and used the exact reverse of their arguments then.
I realize that parties are not the same throughout their history. They are organic, living and changing things, but there is a certain irony when the exact same people who in some situations criticized the imposition of a consumption tax are now reversing their position to criticize the decreasing of a consumption tax.
We have done other things. Among them, we have helped to increase the basic deduction for income taxes.
As I see my time is winding down, let me say finally that cutting taxes and watching the deficit are two of the most important things, but we must also make sure that we spend on necessities, not frills. We have increased spending on certain things such as infrastructure and direct targeting to communities in need. Those sorts of things are necessary to promote and protect our society, particularly regions of our society that are at a disadvantage due to outside forces.
Targeted wise spending on solid things, cutting the budget, cutting the deficit by balancing the budget, and cutting taxes are the priorities of the government. They are the priorities--