Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that advice. I will not necessarily follow it but I will come to the subject of immigration shortly.
Since the news of the morning is so timely, I thought the House might wish to know some of the headlines from this morning's Statistics Canada report: “Exports fall”, “Business investment slows”, “Personal spending moderates”, “Housing investment declines”, “Prices move upward”. Those are the things that real Canadians are dealing with right now. The last thing they want to hear is the finance minister telling them that they have never had it so good.
What they do want is an explanation from the government as to how it squandered the $13 billion surplus that it inherited just over two years ago and how it has taken this country to the brink of deficit. The fiscal cupboard is bare right now. Some experts are saying that we are already in deficit. It would not be the first time the finance minister hit a deficit and pretended he was in surplus.
Whether we are in deficit or just a SARS crisis away from deficit, the fact is that the government overspent when times were good, leaving nothing in the cupboard, as the Statistics Canada report this morning suggests, for when times are bad. A prudent finance minister would have spent less when times were good, leaving more money available right now when times are bad with which to support the economy.
The finance minister's stewardship has been so bad that at this moment, when the Canadian economy needs support, he has no money unless he wants to go back into deficit. I would not be terribly surprised if he did go back into deficit. That is what the Ontario government did when he was a senior minister. Indeed, the Ontario government pretended it had a balanced budget and ran an election on a balanced budget. However, when the Conservatives lost that election in 2003 and Dalton McGuinty called in the auditors, lo and behold, the auditors discovered that there was in fact a $5.6 billion deficit.
Since the government acknowledges that it is right on the brink of deficit, I wonder whether the experience of Ontario might be repeated and, indeed, we might already be in deficit but a deficit hidden by the government.
On the question of immigration, the parliamentary secretary is entirely wrong when he says that the Liberal Party supports the government amendments on immigration. As my colleague pointed out recently, the government is changing the picture of an immigrant from a person to a commodity. The fact is that if substantial new resources are not put into immigration, which the government is not doing, that implies that if one group is fast-tracked, by definition another group is slow-tracked.
The parliamentary secretary can talk all he likes about people lining up in Egypt to come to Canada but fewer of those people will be able to come to Canada under the government's rules than would have been able to come to Canada under the previous rules. It is fast-tracking economic immigrants and, given that the resources are pretty well constant or at a very modest increase, that implies that it is slow-tracking family reunification.
I believe it is important that we choose immigrants who are needed in the economy but I do not believe that should be at the expense of family reunification, which is precisely the price the government is imposing on family reunification by its proposals.
Indeed, we do not even know where these proposals will lead because they provide enormous additional powers to the immigration minister. The government is asking Canadians to trust it but it will tell them what it is going to do. Why should Canadians trust the government in light of all of the unfolding scandals that we have been experiencing in recent months?
Whether it is the security problems associated with the former foreign affairs minister, whether it is the in and out Elections Canada scandal, whether it is the emerging new scandal on NAFTA-gate, or whether it is broken promises on anything from income trusts to the Atlantic accord, Canadians have no reason to trust the government.
Therefore, when the government asks Canadians to trust it to do the right thing on the immigration provisions, I do not think Canadians will accept the government's proposition.