Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to rise and speak on Bill C-51.
I know that some children come home from school and rather than watch Hannah Montana, they watch the Parliament of Canada and hope to learn something. Just for the youngsters at home, “No, you did not fall through the rabbit hole and you are not sitting and having tea with the Mad Hatters in the Liberal Party.”
We are talking about the implementation of a budget that was decided last spring. For the youngsters back home, I will just put it in context so that we are very clear about what this is about. The Budget Implementation Act that is being examined now includes some of the key elements that were in the Conservative budget back in the spring.
The New Democratic Party will be supporting this implementation because there are some key elements of the budget that we think will be very important for Canadians, for example, the home renovation tax credit. That was promised to Canadians in the spring. Canadians went out and spent money based on the belief that when tax time came around, they would be able to make the most of the home renovation tax credit.
Our colleagues in the Liberal Party, however, are telling Canadians “No. Do not look to the home renovation tax credit. Look to giving us government. If we are given government, then down the road we will implement the home renovation tax credit.” It is the Liberal Party putting themselves and their power ahead of average Canadians.
It is the same thing for the first-time homebuyers' tax credit. It was in the budget. Canadians who believed it would help them went out and bought homes. The leader of the Liberal Party said, “No, little people wanting to buy your first homes, you are not going to get that until we get government.”
We see the issue of income deferral for farmers breeding livestock in drought conditions. Anybody who represents a rural riding knows the crisis we are seeing in agriculture. That is something we in the New Democratic Party would support.
There are changes to the working income tax benefit.
These are elements that will help average Canadians. Again putting this in the context of last spring's budget, the Liberal Party supported the budget, and we are going to work through how it was that they supported the budget. The New Democratic Party at that time opposed the budget because we felt that the government was on a very rocky and erratic course in terms of Canada's economy.
I am going to go back to how that budget came about, but I want to say that at this point in the life of this Parliament there are elements in that budget, the overall vision of which we opposed, that will help average Canadians. Our job as members of Parliament, especially in a minority context, is to examine the various pieces of legislation and say, “What is the overall impact? Will it help or will it hurt?”
In terms of the overall implementation of these key areas, we support that. It does not mean we support a blank cheque to the Conservative Party to carry on as they have.
Let us go back for the youngsters at home who are watching, just so that they get a sense of how things unfolded here. Some day in a history lesson they will probably read about the famous finance minister's fiscal update when he came into the House soon after this Parliament was reconvened and said he was going to bring an economic update. Now, that economic update was happening as the world economy was melting down.
We had seen the warning signs in the U.S. for some time with the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market. We saw the U.S. market going south long before it happened in Canada. As the stock markets began to crash, and Canadians' private equity and savings were eaten up at a staggering rate last September, our Prime Minister was saying there were going to be lots of good bargains out there and that people should pick up some good bargains.
I am sure that if Canadians had taken the Prime Minister's advice then, they would have seen what savings they had disappear even further. This was the sense of bizarre unreality that the Conservative government had.
In November the government came in with its economic update. Now, of course we put this against the threat of a complete global meltdown and what do we have? Well, it said we were in surplus and would remain in surplus. We now know that the government was already $10 billion in the hole because of its bizarre spending habits in terms of giving everything over to the corporations in tax cuts. So we were already in the hole, and the government said that in order to get out of any further holes, it would just sell off all our public buildings, which we know is a fundamental action of these free marketeers.
However, in terms of the November economic stimulus plan the government had four key elements. It was going to cut pay equity. How that was going to help the economic stimulus, I do not know. It was going to strip environmental protections on our river ways and waterways. How that would help the economy, I am not sure. It was going to cut the rest of Kyoto. We know that party basically exists to protect the tar sands. It was going to cut funding for the political parties of Canada.
For those back home who are paying attention, there were four issues the Liberals could have stood up on: cut pay equity; strip environmental protection of river ways; gut Kyoto; and cut funding for political parties. What did the Liberal Party decide to get up on its hind legs over? It was not about pay equity. The Liberals stood with the Conservatives and supported it. It was not about protecting the acts that were in place to protect our river ways. The Liberal Party said there was no problem with that. It was not about gutting Kyoto. The former leader of the Liberal Party almost had to put down his dog named Kyoto. The Liberal Party supported the government.
However, when it came time to rolling over about the funding for the Liberals as a political party, that is when the Liberal Party said no, that it would form a coalition.
The Conservatives were howling in outrage. I remember some of my dear colleagues over there said that I should be taken out and hung for providing an alternative such as a coalition. They were howling at the moon. They were pounding their chests. They were saying that this was unconscionable. However, we knew the Liberals were not going to follow through because the Conservatives rolled over and said that they would not take our electoral funding away. At that moment, it became okay for the Liberals to back everything that was in the budget. They were fine with that.
For the folks back home, I noticed all day long the Liberals have kept referring to themselves as the official opposition. Because branding is so important in politics, I think they are concerned people will forget exactly who they are. Seventy-nine times in a row, they did whatever the Conservative Party wanted until this last September.
Again, we will jump forward to another piece of very strange political history, about which I am sure the future Pierre Bertons will talk. It is that famous weekend in Sudbury, when the Liberals decided they were once again, and I do not know how many times they decided to do this, going to reinvent themselves. Going into that caucus meeting, they were saying that people did not want an election, that they had to get this thing through and that they had to stay stable. Nobody had heard from the great Liberal leader for some time. He had been off at his cottage, thinking great thoughts. He came out and said that from now on the Liberals would oppose everything. It did not matter, but they had to reassert themselves because they wanted the government.