There is no question that the nation was on the verge of bankruptcy. There was a lot of despair in the country. Industries were being torn down. Unemployment rates were up. Interest rates were up. There was a general funk in the land.
What we need to look at is where we arrived as Canadians. In all those years we got to the point where, not only did we deal with the fiscal deficit and make strategic investments, but we ended up having the best economy in the G-7 and a post-secondary education sector that was paying huge dividends.
We will be going through the experience of a Conservative government once again. It is important to look at some of the senior folks who came in from the province of Ontario because it tells us a whole lot. Some of these folks are the finance minister, the President of the Treasury Board and the health minister, all of whom occupied senior positions in the Progressive Conservative government in the province of Ontario.
Those of us from Ontario know the record. We know the record of Ipperwash and of Walkerton. We know the record of messing up on hydro. We know about the sale of Highway 407 for a fraction of its value. We know how the government savaged universities and hospitals and eliminated social programs. It also promised a balanced budget and delivered a $5 billion to $6 billion deficit. I think that is telling.
I want to start off with what happened to the Kelowna accord. It is not unlike us to talk about what the Conservative government's dealings were with our first nations and aboriginal peoples. It totally trashed an agreement that was agreed to by the territories, all of the provinces and the federal government. The first nations and aboriginal peoples were pleading with members of the New Democratic Party not to bring the government down because I think they saw what was going to happen. Now Premier Campbell is carrying on the fight with some other premiers.
In the area of education, the Liberal government put a huge emphasis and priority on it. It really spoke to our values. We invested billions of dollars into research, student aid and the millennium scholarship program. We were going to make post-secondary education accessible to all Canadians. A strategic plan is when a government plans for the future but that is not in this budget.
The billions that were put into research and development will not be dealt with by the government opposite.
One of the most important features of the strategic plan was the early childhood education component. In my community we are losing child care spaces because the money that was promised will end this year. The dreams of single mothers and people in need of early childhood education have been shattered. The money will no longer be there and spaces are being cut back right now. The Conservative Party is proud and happy about that.
The Conservative government will hire 1,000 more RCMP officers and it will build more jails. Let us look at 1,000 RCMP officers and then look at the number of early childhood educators we could have. We could have, dare I say, at least 5,000 given what the early childhood education folks get paid. One can just imagine how many child care spaces could be constructed with the money being used to build penitentiaries.
The party opposite needs to recognize that the United States of America practises the kind of philosophy it wants to make happen here. However it does not work. The state of California spends more money on incarcerating people than it does on post-secondary education. Would anyone in this chamber say that the U.S. has safer communities? Far from it. The U.S. incarcerates more people per capita than any other country in the western world. It is one of the few nations that still executes people and that kind of approach does not work. It breeds violence, it makes society less secure and it wastes money.
With the money it costs to keep a young offender in jail for one year we could pay for a master's program for that individual. Do we want to invest in sending somebody to jail? We can call it post-secondary education for crime because that is what it is. Or, do we want to invest in them by giving them opportunities to train and become educated so they can become productive members of our society which, in turn, produces a safer community?
Prior to coming into Parliament, I used to work in crime prevention and crime prevention really does work. The general rule is that $1 invested pays off $7 in dividends. If we look at what happened in the province of Ontario where the get tough on crime approach was taken up, more problems arose, particularly in the inner cities where programs that were meant to deal with youth at risk were destroyed by that government. This is essentially the same road that the federal government is heading down.
We have heard a lot of talk on the issue of citizenship and immigration in the last couple of days. The government opposite mentioned that it would cut in half the right of landing fee. The Liberal government was going to eliminate over a number of years the right of landing fees. It was in our platform. I know my friends opposite do not like it but that is the reality. We put more money into settlement and integration funding than the Conservatives did with this budget.
In terms of credential recognition, we actually did something about it. In the last election the Conservatives promised that they would set up an agency to deal with credentials and now we learn in the budget that they will be studying it for two years. They will have to learn to watch their rhetoric. This is a cynical budget.
In terms of the environment, Kyoto is dead. The Conservatives killed Kyoto. Many have asked why our emissions are up. Our emissions are up because the production of the tar sands is up and the tar sand production goes to the United States as an export. That could be solved very easily. It could be solved by taking $1 per barrel of oil from the tar sands and buying the credits that we rightfully should and quit giving the Americans a free ride.
