Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to participate in the debate.
On the weekend, our American friends had a rally to restore sanity and/or fear in Washington and it attracted a substantial crowd. It was a sort of humourous, ironic poke at previous rallies. At its core, it was really a response to the bombastic nonsense that gets spouted by the Conservative right, with, may I say, some assistance by the left, as well, which is not without guilt in this matter.
The lunacy that passes for political discourse in the U.S. sometimes makes us shake our heads. It is hard to take things seriously when the United States is looking at multiple trillion dollar deficits, historically high unemployment and absurd disparities between the über-wealthy and literally millions of people who are desperately poor. However, listening to the high-paid media punditry is a little like watching a dialogue of the deaf. It is all gesturing and positioning but no hearing or listening. Yet America goes from crisis to crisis and back again.
My favourite sign at the rally was one that said, “What do we want?”. The response was, “Reasonable discourse”. Another sign said, “When do we want it?”. The response was, Well, sometime in the not too distant future”.
Indeed, in some respects, that applies to our situation here. Canadians do tend to be a touch overly smug about our American cousins. We do tend to sort of watch them like a train wreck in slow motion and want to scream at the television, “Engineer, stop this train”.
However, we should really have our own rally here to restore fiscal sanity.
How can the Conservatives possibly pat themselves on the back if they take a $13 billion surplus, inherited from Messrs. Martin and Chrétien, and turn it into a $56 billion deficit in three short years? How do they take an unemployment rate of something south of 6%, turn it into an unemployment rate of something north of 8% and call themselves a good fiscal manager? How do they take spending, which, by any measurement anywhere, is out of control, and count themselves as a good fiscal manager?
How do they take $14 billion out of a revenue stream year after year, which, over five years, is something in the order of $90 billion, jack up the debt by $156 billion and freeze funds for the most desperately poor in the international community, and still go around patting themselves on the back?
That is why I think we should have our own rally here to restore fiscal sanity to our nation.
The irony was that it was called a rally to restore sanity and/or fear, because in this nation, with the current government, it really is give fear a chance, tap into people's fears and they will let us do almost anything. We certainly do not need to have any political dialogue that makes any sense at all. In fact, members are so disgusted with the level of discourse in this chamber that they supported the hon. member for Halton's motion to reorganize the way in which we carry on political discourse here in this chamber.
We also do not want anything that would pass for miracle research, hence, the big fuss over the census. The census is probably the bedrock of empirical data for this country. It is relied upon by literally thousands of organizations. However, If we do not have that bedrock of data, we do not necessarily have any problems and, if we do not have any problems, we do not need to worry about them. We can simply rely on our own ideology to initiate or not initiate things as we see fit. All we need to do is play on people's fears. We can say that the crime rate is out of control but who actually knows? There is no data to support that one way or another. Without the census, there is no hard data and no objective way of deciding. Therefore, we just play on the fears, so we will be having another crime agenda, according to the justice minister in question period.
How would we actually know that there are crime related issues if there is no data to support it one way or another? Therefore, we repeat and repeat and feed into fears and, whether it is objective nonsense or not, we keep on with the repetition of phrases like tax and spend, one of the favourite phrases around here.
It is irrelevant that the government is far and away the nation's most aggressive and biggest spender, literally in the history of the nation. It is supposed to drum that tax and spend message home. It is irrelevant that the government has burdened multiple future generations with debt. It is irrelevant that debts and deficits are merely nothing but postponed taxes. It must drive that tax and spend message home because it may get people fearful enough and dumb enough to believe that the biggest borrow and spend government in our history fancies itself as a good, economic steward.
A rally to restore fiscal sanity is in order. Canadians are sensible people but even sensible people can be stampeded by fear. We want to keep fear alive. It can take a healthy balance sheet inherited from Messrs. Martin and Chrétien, a sane banking system and strong economic fundamentals and turn it upside down and blame the very people who brought us the fiscal sanity in the first place. The government's economic credentials would do credit to a Monty Python skit: up is down, in is out. As Jon Stewart said, “we are living in hard times we are not living in end times”.
Does anyone not smoking something actually believe a finance minister who says that he will not cut transfers, not cut program spending, not cut his largest program items and still balance the budget? However, he will offer a further $6 billion in tax relief to corporations that do not need it, commit a further $35 billion to an airplane and spend $10 billion to $13 billion on prisons, which the government did not really tell Canadians about when it was passing the Truth in Sentencing Act. It was not until the Parliamentary Budget Officer caught the government with its hands in the cookie jar that it fessed up to it at the last minute.
When we put that all together, it just does not make a lot of sane economic rationale.
A rally to restore fiscal sanity cannot begin soon enough. Our nation cannot afford to go the way of the U.S. where its revenue base has been destroyed, costs are through the moon and the country is slogging through a legacy burden that would have destroyed a lesser nation.
Borrowing to cut taxes just does not work. It never has worked and it never will work. CEOs would not cut back their revenues and then let costs get away from them. It does not work in a business, it does not work at home and it does not work in government.
I am hopeful that I am starting a revolution, a rally to restore fiscal sanity. Tax cuts are not a religion. It is rank demagoguery to say tax and spend and all that sort of silly nonsense that gets spouted by the finance minister and the Prime Minister and others.
The government needs to have conversation about its revenue base and its cost base. The government spends 15% of the nation's GDP. It cannot carry on the way it has been without bequeathing to our future generations multiple billion dollars worth of debt. That is no way to run a nation and it is certainly not fiscal sanity.