Mr. Speaker, let me start by asserting that we are all in a profession that is not held in high esteem. It is earned not only by our actions but our inactions. In this regard, there is a proposal before the House for us to take some measure of action that will indicate to the Canadian public that this place is sensitive to the needs of the people.
Governments themselves do not have money. We are the custodians of the taxpayers' money. We are judged on whether we make good, wise decisions and good laws. The motion before this place today is a proxy for virtually everything that has ever happened in any government by any party. We have been talking all day long about which party did what and who was at fault. It has been a rambling debate. I think the people who come to this place and sit in the gallery must wonder what is happening in our Parliament.
Why is there a question on the floor that is not getting the attention it deserves, at least in the generic sense? It is about whether we should be dealing with waste and mismanagement. As one member just said, at a time when the country is facing economic duress and high unemployment, we have an obligation as parliamentarians to constantly be prudent with the use of taxpayer dollars.
Today there is what is called an opposition motion. It is a motion proposed by one party. We are debating it today and tomorrow we will vote on it. I do not think that it is all-inclusive in its precision but it is all-inclusive in its intent. For those who may have forgotten what we are debating today, this motion reads:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should show leadership in reducing government waste by rolling-back its own expenditures on massive amounts of partisan, taxpayer-paid government advertising, ministerial use of government aircraft, the hiring of external “consultants”, and the size of the Cabinet, the Prime Minister's Office and the Privy Council Office, which together could represent a saving to taxpayers of more than a billion dollars;--
It is a long ramble but it says that there is an opportunity here. I do not think it is all going to happen, but it does raise a premise. It goes on:
—and to show its own leadership in this regard, the House directs its Board of Internal Economy to take all necessary steps to end immediately the wasteful practice of Members sending mass mailings, known as “ten-percenters”, into ridings other than their own, which could represent another saving to taxpayers of more than $10 million.
For the ordinary constituent in our ridings, when we start talking about billions and millions of dollars, this is important. However, we know that, in terms of the finances of the nation, what we do with billions of dollars is where we start. It is tens of billions of dollars. We are talking about the delivery of essential programs and services to Canadians. If people cannot manage $10 million properly, how can they be trusted? We need to be sensitive to the fact that it is an issue of trust.
I am in my 17th year in this House and I still fight each and every day for fairness and equity for people, for prudence, for due diligence and for making good laws and wise decisions. We say that prayer every day when we come to this place before we start. Every now and then, there is no question, pick a party, a government or a time right back to the beginning of time, and it will be found that people have made bad decisions.
People have done bad things and wrong things. They have mismanaged money and squandered resources, which is why our profession is not held in high esteem. However, just because that may have been the case, it does not mean that members need to rise here and continue to add to that perception of what members of Parliament stand for.
We have before us an opportunity to indicate there is something we can do on a specific range of issues. Is there some openness to say these are the kinds of things we might be able to do?
I could stand here and go through a litany of all the things the current government has done that I am not happy about, but I am not sure if that advances the argument.
I could talk about the government's treatment of income trusts, breaking a promise it made during the 2006 election and imposing a 31.5% tax. That is a problem. That is a broken promise. That party will have to bear the consequences of that.
There are other consequences to the decision made by the Conservative government. Since that decision was taken, there has been a sale of, I believe, 25% of income trusts in Canada to foreign interests. It has lost revenue to the treasury of the government of the people of Canada, revenue of about $1.5 billion annually in taxes.
That tax comes fully into force on January 1, 2011. Over the next few months, the other 75% of income trusts will probably be finding out how they can morph themselves into another entity, whether it be back to being a corporation or maybe even bought offshore, which will cost us even more. Yet the argument for taxing them in the first place happened to be that there was a tax leakage.
This is the first time I ever remember being involved in a government's providing documents to the finance committee that were redacted, blacked out. The government made a decision. It wants to be accountable, but it will not show us the numbers. I am not sure why, but it is a matter of state secrecy.
If we want to talk about state secrets I suppose we could talk about Afghan detainees, but I do not think we should be talking about that.