Mr. Speaker, it is my great pleasure to rise in the House today to speak in favour of Bill C-38, the jobs, growth and long-term prosperity act. The budget we introduced on March 29 is a moderate budget that keeps us on a strong fiscal track to balance the budget by the 2015-16 fiscal year.
On the weekend I was reading a story, Chicken Little, to my young daughter. In the story, a leaf falls from a tree and lands on the little chicken's head, and the chicken thinks the sky is falling. My daughter was very intrigued by this story, and we started to talk a little about it. I was curious about the origins of the story.
We went on to Google, looked and did a little research. We found that there is such a thing as a Chicken Little syndrome. I have to say that the first thing I thought about when I read about Chicken Little syndrome was the NDP. I dug out a definition. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Chicken LIttle syndrome is “one who warns of or predicts calamity especially without justification”.
That pretty much describes what the NDP is all about. It seems to be frozen in perturbation. What I mean by that is if we go back in the NDP history, back to J. S. Woodsworth, to Coldwell, to Douglas, to these great giants who were leaders, they—even Hazen Argue, the only NDPer ever appointed to the Senate, although he did switch to be a Liberal upon appointment—worked with the governments of the day. They were not destructive entities within the House. They did not oppose for the sake of opposing.
I had a number of calls from constituents over the end of last week and throughout the weekend. They said to me, “Mark, what is the opposition up to?”
When I was canvassing last year, on this side of the House we promised the people we would go to Ottawa and would sweat and bleed for them. We would work our hearts out for the people. We would not play games of process and procedure.
This is what the NDP does. The NDP and its Liberal partners stop us from doing the work of the people, the people who sent us here in a strong, stable, national Conservative majority government. The NDP members talk about how they did not have enough time to examine the budget. I sit on the finance committee, and we had 50 hours of debate on the budget. We had a subcommittee that looked into the budget for 20 hours.
If we combine the total hours of debate on the previous seven budgets, this budget has received twice as much debate. Absolutely, wow. The member for Burnaby—New Westminster consumed 13 hours reading Twitters from his mother, and he restricted 27 members—