Mr. Speaker, I understand that my time is short right now in advance of question period, but it is with profound sadness today that I found out about the closure of the Barrie Examiner and the Innisfil Examiner as a result of cuts to the newspaper industry. The Barrie Examiner has been a stalwart within our community since 1864. I know in talking to you, Mr. Speaker, that you are sad as well about the Orillia Packet and Times.
May I remind the House that newspaper closures do not just affect the newspaper, they affect those who work with those newspapers. I can think of people like Bob Bruton, Ian McInroy, and award-winning photojournalist Mark Wanzel, who today have lost their jobs. As well, at the Innisfil Examiner, Miriam King, who I just happened to be with yesterday at the Innisfil Santa Claus Parade. There is profound sadness within our community, not just for the focus on community news and events, but for the people impacted by this. These are people who are directly involved in our community every day not just reporting the news, but supporting the many organizations within Barrie—Innisfil.
I want to send them my best wishes in advance of my speaking about the budget implementation bill.
In the last election, as I campaigned throughout the riding of Barrie—Innisfil, I talked about it being a “chicken in every pot” election. What the Liberals were promising, as the third party with roughly 35 seats, was basically a chicken in every pot in the last election. It is easy when one is sitting there as the third party to make all kinds of promises, but as we have seen after two years, living up to those promises has been extremely difficult.
It is no surprise that Canadians voted for change. Unfortunately, that happens in politics. However, I think many Canadians right now are living with voter's remorse, in the sense that a lot of the things they thought were going to happen with the Liberal government are not happening, or happening in a much worse case scenario that we deal with in this budget implementation act.
This is an omnibus bill. In spite of the fact that the Prime Minister campaigned on no omnibus bills, he actually has introduced several omnibus pieces of legislation. Many Canadians voted for change, which is their prerogative to do, but I do not think they voted for this. Also, I do not think they voted for deficit spending. In the last election, the Liberals spoke about $10 billion in deficit spending, and now we learn from Finance Canada that even the Prime Minister and the finance minister will not admit when we are going to see the end of deficits. There are deficits are as far as the eye can see. The profound effect of deficits in this country is on young people, people like my children and many other millions of Canadian children across this country who are going to have to pay for this deficit spending for generations to come.
I heard somebody muse recently that it is Liberals who make a mess and that eventually it is Conservatives who have to clean that mess up. We are hopefully going to be in that position again within two years. Hopefully they do not make too much of a mess and that we are not overburdened to clean it up.
As an Ontario MP, why in Ontario are we concerned about this? Because we are compounding the problem. We have a provincial government $330 billion in debt, the largest sub-sovereign debtor nation in the world, and now we are compounding it with this. Think of what that is going to mean to our children.
I am going to pick up those thoughts after we are done.