Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to follow the member for Kelowna—Lake Country. I also wish him the very best in the future as he moves on to new challenges in a couple of years.
I want to give my colleagues in the House the four top reasons, as I see them, why they should not support the bill. The first reason would be that this is nothing but broken promises.
I just want to read from the actual Liberal budget because it is fascinating. It states:
A commitment to sound financial management is never easy and it is never over. It is not something to be done once or just for a while and then set aside. It requires the steady, unrelenting application of rigorous discipline and vigilance....
That lasted a few weeks and then in the motel we found out what the threshold of rigorous discipline and vigilance was. That was over quick. Who lit whose cigarette after it was over?
Then we have this gem. This is another broken promise. “Debt reduction is not something we do...”. Now we know in this bill of course they capped debt reduction. They cut it down immensely in favour of throwing money at general categories without specific plans or measurable goals, nothing achievable there that the Auditor General could audit or to which we could hold them accountable.
Here is what the finance minister said in the budget speech, and boy, to some it rang true that day. He said:
Debt reduction is not something we do to please the economists. It's something we do to benefit Canadians. Reducing debt in a reasonable and measured way relieves a big burden on future generations. It saves billions of dollars in servicing charges, facilitates credit rating, lower interest rates, rising standards of living and most importantly this is something the vast majority of Canadians believe is the right thing to do.
I guess they did the wrong thing when they changed their mind and broke that promise.
There is a second reason. “Haste makes waste”, my gramma used to say and she was right and she was a lot smarter than the people who signed this deal because what it does is make waste. The best example of wasteful haste I could give in recent years is the following.
In December 2001 the Auditor General released an examination of the relief for heating expense program. Parliamentary oversight was weakened as a consequence of this, it said. It said that only about $250 to $350 million of the over $1.4 billion that was paid out in that program actually went to the people it was supposed to go to but the government had to get it out as quickly as possible. Heaven knows, there was urgency, there was power to be held on to.
The government threw money at the problem which is exactly what it is doing here. However only about 15% to 25% of that money actually went to the people it was supposed to go to. The 600,000 low and modest income Canadians who needed it received nothing but 4,000 Canadian taxpayers who did not live in Canada got it, as did 7,500 dead people, which is where Liberal ideas go. I think it has been estimated that 1,600 prisoners in federal institutions also received a subsidy cheque from the government. That is what vote buying is. That is all that it is and that is what it is again.
Those were a couple of reasons but let me give another reason. One cannot teach old Liberal dogs new tricks. What I mean by that has to do with the way in which the government throws money at a problem. It does that because it thinks it demonstrates compassion. However it is called conspicuous compassion when the government throws money at a problem saying that it cares because it is throwing someone else's money at the problem.
The Liberals signed a deal with the NDP because, as they say, they care so much about aboriginal kids who need post-secondary education.
This does not take a long term memory to know. Last November the Auditor General, after having examined the post-secondary education program run out of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, released a report stating:
--significant weaknesses exist in the Department's management and accountability framework for the program. The Department has not clearly defined and documented its roles and responsibilities, the way that it allocates funds to First Nations does not ensure equitable access to as many students as possible, and it does not know whether the funds allocated have been used for the purpose intended.
That is what the Auditor General said, “throw money at the problem”. That money will never get to the kids who need it. There is not a chance. There is anecdotal evidence that fewer aboriginal children in the country are getting these funds now than was the case five years ago. Now we are going to throw more money at the problem.
That is the kind of idiocy we have been presented in the budget bill. I will not stand for it and I know my party will not stand for it. This is not the way we look after aboriginal young people. This is not the way we look at the health care needs of Canadians. This is not the way we look after the environmental priorities and the housing priorities of Canadians. It is not going to happen.
The big problem with this is the blank post-dated cheque that the government and the NDP, working together in isolation and overnight, decided they wanted to lure Canadians with. The finance minister is embarrassed by this legislation or he would be here defending it. Every time I ask the parliamentary secretary about it at committee, he just says “you made me do it”. It reminds me of the comedian Flip Wilson who always said “the devil made me do it”.
The Liberals say that the Conservatives made them sign that deal. They will not defend it because they know it is wrong. Governments through the generations in this country have tried diligently to get a handle on bureaucratic growth and excessive expenditure. Without constraints, every bureaucracy grows and so every government has systematically put in place expenditure review processes that manage the money, that try to manage it down and get a handle on it and get control over it. It is hard to do. It is like a ratchet. It is hard to ratchet it down but it is easy to ratchet it up.
When these guys promised overnight to send $4.6 billion more out, the message they sent was a bad one. I have to say that the Prime Minister's legacy is being trashed by this bill. I have to give him credit for leading an exercise in expenditure review with no end runs allowed. Every department had to do their share. John Manley tried to run out and run around the end. He tried to escape but he could not do it. Everyone was going to do their part. Even with all the work and effort they put into over months and months, they still could not get the cuts they wanted because they did not have the support of the bureaucracy.
What kind of support are they going to get from the bureaucracy now? They will not get any support to cut but they will get lots of support to spend.
They have to ratchet up because most of the commitments they are making require municipal and provincial partnerships.
When I go home my friends keep reminding me that I always talk about federal government spending, but they then go on to tell me that it all comes out of one pocket. They tell me that it does not matter whether it is their school stuff, their property stuff, their provincial stuff or their federal stuff, all the money comes out of their pocket. They tell me that they work half a year to pay taxes and that they would like us to do a better job of getting control on our spending. This bill does not do it. The bill does the opposite. It sends the message that it is okay to votes the old-fashioned way.
The biggest heartfelt objection I have to the bill is the false hopes that it sends to the people who care about these issues. When it tells aboriginal people we are going to spend more money on houses and no one is going to own them, we have not addressed the real problem. Most houses last less than half as long as the average housing stock because no one owns them. Aboriginal people are smart people. They understand that. They know we have to have a system brought into this country, and 62 reserves I know of have done it, but the other 95% have not because there is no leadership here.
What those guys do is insane. Insanity is best defined as doing things the same way we always have in the past and expecting different results, and that is what the Liberals are doing here yet again.
The false hopes of people who care about young aboriginal people, who care about the environment, have been inflated with these bold and airy promises. It is vacuous, it is phony and it is false, and the Liberals should be ashamed of themselves for entering into the agreement.
However I know, as Benjamin Disraeli used to say, the Liberal Party is an organized hypocrisy dedicated solely and exclusively to the pursuit of power, so I expect nothing different from them.
I will conclude by saying that what I find most objectionable about the conduct of the government has been defined clearly for me in this last number of days and weeks. The difference between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party is that the Liberal Party thinks that everyone can be bought, that everyone is for sale. They believe everyone has a price tag and we, on this side of the House, believe in principle. We will stand for the principles we believe in and we are standing for them now. I do not know where the Liberals are but they may be hiding under their desks.
The fact remains that when the Liberals try to buy their way out of a vote buying scandal, one of the worst in Canadian history, by buying more votes, that is a shame. When they try to buy their way to power by buying the NDP with bold general promises that they will not fulfill, that is a shame. When they buy a billionaire, ladies and gentlemen, I guess they think all of us can be bought.
