Madam Speaker, it is always an interesting experience to listen to Liberals try to give themselves a clean conscience, as they vote against women's rights, the environment and social and union rights. They try to give themselves a clean conscience by convincing themselves that somehow this is a stimulus package that will help the economy, whereas their member from Markham—Unionville, who has always been with me in committee, has said the same thing; that a lot of this is a pure fiction.
Of the 1.9% of GDP that is supposed to be in this budget, those members presume that a lot of the money will come from municipalities and provinces that do not have the money. That is a fiction. A lot of it is supposed savings in government spending. The Conservatives are the worst public administrators in the history of Canada. Prior to this budget, which has a large deficit, they had already increased public spending by the order of 25%, almost $40 billion a year, with nothing to show for it.
This so-called stimulus package has almost nothing left in it except for the $3 billion slush fund that the Conservatives keep talking about now and that has to be put through with the same urgency. They are using a very real political and economic emergency at this time in the country to try to take away the normal rules of control of public spending.
This is exactly what the corrupt Liberals did with the sponsorship scandal. There was a very real national urgency with regard to national unity in the wake of the 1995 referendum. The Liberals said that we had this unity problem, so they would spend hundreds of millions of dollars of public money. They forgot to say that they would take away all the normal controls and fill their pockets with millions of those dollars. That is the sad legacy of the Liberal Party. That is why no one who actually knows the Liberals is surprised to see them talking about women's rights and the environment and then voting against them.
One of their members, I think Toronto Beaches is the name of her riding, spoke eloquently yesterday, and I congratulated her when I saw her alone. I asked her if she would do like the members from Newfoundland and Labrador and stand up and vote against the budget. She walked away, having nothing to say. I saw her today, shamefully standing up and voting for the Conservative budget because, like all the other Liberals, she is devoid of principles. She talks a good game when it comes to women's rights, but will not back them up when it comes to a vote.