Mr. Speaker, I shall continue as best I can knowing that the mover of the motion only spoke to two specific bills, one in 1994 and the one earlier this spring that implemented our budget. Within that context, I will attempt to speak to those two bills as you, Mr. Speaker, have limited our debate as such. That will create challenges, I think, for every member of the House and I look forward to seeing how they cope with that, but I will move forward on that basis.
The motion that the Liberal House leader made refers to statements that were made by the then member for Calgary West almost 20 years ago. We should put those comments in context. I also want to provide some other quotes from that debate in which the members of the Liberal Party, now the third party, would, I am sure, be interested.
The original comments were made as part of a point of order to the Speaker. The Speaker did not find in the Liberals' favour at that time. Mr. Speaker Parent ruled:
In conclusion, it is procedurally correct and common practice for a bill to amend, repeal or enact several statutes.
Therefore, the ruling was settled at that time, some 20 years ago almost, and here we are revisiting it today.
Prior to that ruling, members weighed in. I will remind the House about some of the comments from that debate. Take, for example, the following:
While the subject matter may be diverse, I suggest to the hon. member that given the fact they were all introduced in the budget, they form a whole, unified policy thrust which the government has put forward....
That comment, which talked about it as a coherent economic plan and gave the basis for putting all those measures in one bill, came, no less, from the Liberals' leading parliamentary expert, Peter Milliken, in support of the use of budget implementation bills. He went on to outline some of the items in the Budget Implementation Act, very similar to my comments earlier. He was talking about items like programs to stimulate job creation and economic growth, measures to help balance the budget and improvements to the employment insurance system, all items that were included in that bill. It sounds an awful lot like it addresses the same subjects that economic action plan 2012 does.
What the 2012 budget plan does is cover the exact same subject matter. Of course, Mr. Milliken's comments were on the Liberal 1994 budget, but it is striking how the subject matter of the items covered is exactly the same.
Despite the Liberals' track record, they brought forward this motion today. It runs contrary to their own record and it is not anything more than a cynical attempt to accomplish their actual agenda to try to block our government from implementing our economic action plan.
While our government is focused on creating jobs, economic growth and securing long-term prosperity, the opposition is, sadly, once again focused on political games and obstruction. We will not be sidetracked by those games and obstruction. We will continue to stay the course and implement our plan to continue to build on the 820,000 net new jobs created since July 2009 and get Canada through these difficult times of economic uncertainty.