One of the ministers from Winnipeg just said that they did scrap the wheat board, Mr. Speaker. Unfortunately for him, he is going off his talking points, because the talking point is not that they scrapped it but that they made it better. He just told us that they did scrap it. Whoopsie. More reading for the suntan salon.
The Conservatives dissolved the Canada EI Financing Board, leaving the employment insurance account $9 billion in deficit.
The cabinet takes even more power to rule on environmental assessments and pipelines even while firing the scientists who give them expert advice.
Of course, it is the government that decided during the summer that it was the new church of Conservative scientists. Let us remember what the Conservatives said during the summer: they told us that from now on they had decided they were going to believe in science. How did they prove that? They fired most of the scientists in the government, because they were not needed any more as the Conservatives were now the scientists. The ones the government did not fire were muzzled.
The government is getting rid of things like the Experimental Lakes Area, which is the only place on planet Earth where whole lake ecosystems can be studied. The government is scrapping it.
What do we get from the Conservatives?
The government has an imitator at the other end of the House. He is constantly imitating the newscaster who is given documents to read and does not even know what is in them. He stands up and tells us time and time again that there is really no problem with the Experimental Lakes Area. He says that as long as someone is willing to buy it, it can continue.
Let us imagine. How can we have government scientists doing science in an area that belongs to all Canadians if it is sold to private interests? That is the road the government wants to take us down.
Our very own Ron Burgundy stands up time and time again and reads whatever is put in front of him by the Prime Minister's Office. He does not even know what is written on the piece of paper and does not realize how absurd it is. He is the same person who now believes that Canada is in a situation to actually reduce greenhouse gases and meet its undertakings under international agreements. Nothing could be further from the truth. The government will not be able to meet any of those obligations, because it does not even have a plan to meet them.
As I mentioned earlier, with regard to public safety, there is a pyramid of public administration that exists to protect the public.
When cuts have to be made, the very last things that should be affected are direct services to the public. What are we seeing instead? What did I point out earlier? The Conservatives are making $47 million in cuts to food safety, over $100 million in cuts to air safety and cuts to maritime search and rescue centres. We are talking about services that literally save lives, and the Conservatives are making cuts to them. The Conservatives should ask the people of Quebec City and Kitsilano what they think about this.
The Conservatives are making cuts to the Coast Guard and border security. These are things we are extremely concerned about.
Earlier today, we had the opportunity to listen to the hon. member for Compton—Stanstead describe exactly what is happening at the border in his riding. This is what it means to have no priorities. This is what it means to have no understanding of public administration.
Earlier, I listened to the fantasies and fabrications of the hon. member for Saint Boniface. She painted an imagined picture of what she believes is our approach to public administration.
When we look at the official opposition's experience and the F-35 debacle—a file for which the Conservatives never bothered to assess Canada's needs, never held a competitive bidding process and never determined who the lowest compliant bidder was, and on which they have spent $700 million to date when this aircraft does not even meet Canada's needs—we realize which side of the House the competent MPs are on. It is certainly not the Conservative side. The Conservatives are a bunch of incompetents. Their negligence is disgraceful. We will replace them in 2015.
This week, as 1.3 million pounds of contaminated, tainted meat was being dumped in an Alberta landfill, who was the minister? It was the same minister who four years ago told lame jokes about death by a thousand cold cuts as 23 Canadians died because he had not done his job of putting in place a competent food inspection system.
When the opposition unanimously called for his resignation, who stood up and defended him? The Prime Minister.
This is no longer a question of the incompetent Minister of Agriculture; it is a question of the Prime Minister who is endangering public safety by allowing him to stay in place.
The Minister of Agriculture has absolved himself of any responsibility by saying that he did not carry out the inspections. This is the same gang that every day keeps harping about the queen, everything royal and the monarchy. If they have such nostalgia for the queen, they should think about other parliamentary institutions, the British institutions, where the underpinning of the British parliamentary system is ministerial accountability. It is the minister who is responsible, not the inspectors. It is the minister who did not do his job and who did not ensure that the inspectors were protecting the public. He should be booted out; he is ultimately responsible.
The minister knew about the safety violations at XL Foods. He knew the company was withholding testing data. He knew the Americans had deemed the plant unsafe. In fact, we would never have known about any of this if it had not been for the Americans doing their job of inspecting the meat at the border. Good thing we have the American inspectors as whistleblowers. It took him two more weeks to sound the alarm after the Americans already knew.
Budget cuts of $46.6 million and 300 positions cut is in the budget. Unlike the fantasy about the Navigable Waters Protection Act, that is in the budget: 300 positions cut at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, public protection endangered, Canadian lives endangered.
He dares to point at others. He points at the inspectors and says that it is their fault. Here is where the fault lies. Instead of enforcing legislation in the public interest, instead of doing as the Americans do, going in and enforce, the Conservatives have a self-reporting system. Maybe that is where they got their marks in university. They gave themselves their own marks. They reported their own results to their teachers. Maybe that is what it is. It is the only way to explain it. We do not ask people we are supposed to be enforcing and inspecting to tell us whether they are actually doing it. With public money, we send in inspectors, check them, enforce and regulate in the public interest.
The result is a hit for our farmers and our producers. It is a hit for public confidence in our food system. Everyone loses because the Conservatives are not doing their jobs.
In spite of 50 years of economic growth in our country, the Prime Minister would have us believe that the institutions, the services and the programs we have relied on for generations have suddenly become too expensive and that we can no longer afford them. There is a link between the fact that he is constantly reducing the government's fiscal capacity and the fact that he is now imposing service cuts. In essence, our economic growth is constant, and our institutions reflect what is best about ourselves. These institutions are now at risk because of the negligence, the incompetence of the Conservatives.
Just for fun, let us take a look at this statistic: the small number of chartered banks recorded profits of $33 billion this year. It is a virtual monopoly, an oligopoly. There is no need to be self-congratulatory and proudly remark that they are extraordinary. There are only a few banks in Canada. They have a monopoly and can charge whatever interest rate they want. It is nonsense to say that they are private market wizards. Thirty-three billion dollars in profit equates to $1,000 for every man, woman and child in Canada. Every year, the chartered banks make $1,000 in profit for every Canadian man, woman and child. That does not make sense.
There are institutions that define who we are as a nation.
We are so proud that the NDP, under Tommy Douglas, was responsible for bringing free, universal, public, portable and accessible medical care to our country. We do not think any Canadian family should ever have to choose between having a sick child seen by a doctor and being able to put groceries on the table. I honestly believe there are more things we have in common as individuals than the partisanship on the other side would have us believe. I honestly believe the vast majority of the people who sit across from me in the government benches agree that it is a good thing we do not have an American-style system, that it is a good thing, as Canadians, we take care of each other.
At the beginning I said that is why it was so important to look at the gulf that separated the words of the Conservatives and their actions. In June 2011, shortly after we formed the official opposition, these were a couple of last questions that Jack Layton asked. He asked two very specific questions of the Prime Minister.
First he asked, “Are you going to cut health care?” The answer was categorical. It is in Hansard and is easy to check, “We will not be reducing transfers to health care”. In December of the same year, barely a few months later, during a meeting with his provincial counterparts, the Minister of Finance, over lunch, and it was not even an agenda item, sometime between his coffee and his apple pie, looked over the table and said that he would be removing $36 billion from the projected and budgeted health care transfers from the feds to the provinces. There was no negotiation, no debate, no discussion, straight diktat from the federal government to the provinces. That is the way of the Conservatives. That is not our way.
The other question that Jack Layton asked the Prime Minister in June had to do with pensions. This is what I would call in French, une demi-vérité ou plutôt un demi-mensonge, because it is an art that Conservatives master. It is around, for example, the F-35s. The Minister of National Defence will often go to his microphone and say that not one penny has been spent on F-35 acquisitions—