Rick Borotsik

[Budget Implementation Act, 2000, April 13th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I would just like to touch on that last comment. The reason we are in this mess is because of a government led by a prime minister by the name of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. That is where this mess started with respect to social expenditures which, by the way, were funded out of my son's future and my grandson's future. Let us get that straight right now. The whole mess we are in right now is because of a Liberal government and Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

If we went to $12,000 on the basic personal exemption, we would be—

[Budget Implementation Act, 2000, April 13th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, they like to dispute that. Let us say that it is 25 cents on the dollar, which it is not, even with the tax points. Let us assume they can put that forward. I do not think Canadians are gullible enough to believe that, but they will try to put it forward and will try to get Canadians to believe something that is not in fact true.

There are three issues in health care. The first is that we have an aging population. The government does not seem to recognize it, because we are now back to 1993-94 levels of funding.

I have talked about the new global economy. We live in a globalized world. We have technology that we never considered possible. We have it but we cannot afford it because the government is not prepared to work with the provinces and is not prepared to work on the health care system to make it available to Canadians.

As I said, we have an aging population. There is also technology and inflation. We need money in the system but we also need to work with the provinces and we need co-operation. We will not get any of those with this government.

Bill C-32 also deals with employment insurance. Employment insurance is an insurance program for which Canadians pay a premium so that they are entitled to a benefit from the program when required. By law, the employment insurance program is a flow-through, break even program, an insurance program.

The Liberal government collects $18 billion a year in insurance premiums and pays out $12 billion a year in benefits. It pockets $6 billion of our money. Members of the government do it and say that they are wonderful. They pat themselves on the back because they can use the $6 billion to spend the way they would like to spend it, as has been done perhaps in Shawinigan and in some other mismanaged programs for which they are so famous.

I am sorry Bill C-32 does not contain more substance. Yes, we live in a great country, but Canadians must recognize that we have to protect our standard of living. We cannot protect our standard of living and our quality of life with the mismanagement of this government.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2000, April 13th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to Bill C-32, an act to implement certain provisions of the budget that was tabled in the House on February 28, 2000.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to split my time with my colleague from Cumberland—Colchester. He will be taking half of the speaking time.

It is unfortunate there was not more substance in Bill C-32 with more need to implement more of the provisions that should have been identified in the budget that was tabled in the House on February 28. With budgets, government and governance, the Canadian public is looking for something that is not terribly out of the ordinary and it is not something that is terribly difficult to understand. It seems the government has not had the opportunity to talk to the people in places where they have a tendency to be, the hockey games, the coffee shops in our constituencies.

If we asked the small business owners and other people working in those businesses, it is not difficult to understand what Canadians want. They simply want to have and to hold a job, to earn a living, to educate their children, to buy a house, to have some luxuries, an automobile, and certainly food on their table. They want to be able to earn dollars and to keep and control the dollars they earn.

Unfortunately the budget does not speak to that. The budget still says that if you are a Canadian and you work and you earn money, then the government is going to take that money away from you, because the government knows full well what is better for you as a Canadian citizen and how those dollars should be expended and spent on your behalf. The budget says please do not think that you as a thinking Canadian who can raise that family, keep that job and earn that dollar, know better how to spend those dollars. The government does not believe Canadians are capable of doing that. That philosophy is embraced in the budget that was tabled in the House on February 28. I will speak to that in certain areas.

Also a budget is not simply a financial blueprint; it is a blueprint for the way our society and our country is to grow. It is called vision. I know that word is sometimes overused but certainly it has not gotten through to the members on the government side of the House. They have absolutely no vision. It was mentioned earlier by the hon. member who just spoke that there was a tinkering in the way they do business. It is true.

I use the term caretaker government. It is a caretaker government with a caretaker prime minister who is simply waiting out his days. He is saying that we should do business the way we have always done business, not rock the boat or do anything new and innovative.

However we live in a new and innovative society. We do not live in the 1950s any longer like perhaps the Canadian Alliance would like us to do. We live in a world now which demands that we compete in a globalized world. It demands that our children be educated to a level and standard that they can compete with other nations in the world, not just simply with provinces or the cities adjacent to them.

The government does not recognize that. It has no vision. It has no vision on education. It has no vision on agriculture. We have talked about that. The budget does not speak a word about agriculture. Agriculture, the food on our tables that we eat, is important to Canadian citizens. People who have families, who have jobs and want to educate their children like to put food on their tables, and that comes from agriculture.

The government has absolutely no understanding or idea where the agricultural sector of society is going. There is no vision. The government puts out false hopes, false statements and false programs. Yet the dollars do not get to where they are supposed to go. My constituents have a real feeling of depression because they do not know what kind of future they have.

Let us talk about the lack of vision in health care. The government stands in the House, pats itself on the back and says that it put $2.5 billion into health care in the last budget over four years. The $2.5 billion do not bring us back to a 1993-94 level of expenditure.

Two things are wrong with that. It is not simply the money. It is the vision with respect to health care. The government will not even sit down to work with the provinces, let alone listen to the way it could possibly change the system for the better. It is not prepared to do that because it has no vision and no understanding of where Canadians want to go with that aspect of their lives.

The government has no vision on transportation. Our country was built on transportation, by the rail links, by air and by road. The government does not even know where it is heading with transportation.

Let us talk about Bill C-32 specifically. I mentioned the lack of vision. The government has tried to deal with a couple of areas. One of them was the basic personal deduction. Canadians want to keep their money so they can spend it the best way they see fit. One way to do that is for the government to take less.

It is the Progressive Conservative position that we should have basic personal deductions of $12,000 per year. That is not much money in today's society but it would be a step in the right direction. However the government takes great pride in increasing it by about $100 so that under this government Canadian citizens are not given the right to spend their own money.

Let us talk about CHST. It is not simply a matter of the health dollars that are being transferred. As I said earlier, the health dollars are abysmal. The government should be held accountable for what it did to our health care system. The Prime Minister will be known in history as the man who destroyed our health care system. He did it almost single-handedly, although his backbenchers and his government gave him full rein to do so. They too will have to wear that in history.

What would we do with health care? We would do something that is really foreign to the government, co-operative federalism. It used to be that 50% of health care dollars were contributed by the federal government. That has been reduced. In fact there is a provincial government now that is suggesting it could be as low as 11 cents or 11% of health care dollars.

[Division No. 1263, April 4th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, on March 17 I posed two questions to the minister of agriculture and I am very pleased to see the parliamentary secretary to the minister in the House tonight.

As usual, the two questions I posed were very valid questions. They were very succinct questions. They were very simple questions. I expected an answer from the minister of agriculture but as usual, there was a lot of doublespeak, there was a lot of beating around the bush and in fact no answers to those very simple questions.

The first question was rather interesting because at that time there were a number of supporters who were in town supporting this particular party. A number of people in that particular group of people wanted to reinstate what was known as the GRIP program, the gross revenue insurance program. Lo and behold, when they went to this huge gathering, all of the people in that gathering supported the fact that the government should reinstate the GRIP program.

For your information, Mr. Speaker, the GRIP program was a farm support program put into place prior to 1993 when this government took power and when it got into power in 1995 it in its short term mind decided to get rid of the GRIP program for in fact short term gain but for long term pain.

Here we have a wonderful group of individuals who support the government saying unanimously, “Bring us back the GRIP program”. So I asked the minister a very simple question: “Will you support that particular comment and resolution and will you in fact bring back the GRIP program”. There was no answer.

From there I then went on to very simply say that if the minister does not want to support the GRIP, then let's identify and let's analyze the program that was put in its place and that is the AIDA program. We recognize by the vote itself that AIDA was not being supported by the people who it was meant for, the farmers of western Canada. So we looked at whether there were some advantages to this AIDA program over the GRIP and we looked at the administration costs.

Lo and behold, the administration costs of the AIDA program to deliver some $500 million in 1998 came to a grand total of $35 million, about seven times what the administration costs were to administer not only GRIP but the NISA. NISA and GRIP were less than 2% of all of the program dollars delivered under those programs.

We now have here a program that the government's own supporters say is not good, that it is costing huge dollars that could be going to agriculture and to the farmers themselves and now going to bureaucrats to administer the program, so we ask ourselves, why would the minister of agriculture not want to answer those two simple questions. Why not reinstitute GRIP, a program that is being accepted by all those who wish to have it back, and in fact the government could save money by putting the GRIP program back and not having to spend those exorbitant sums on bureaucrats in the department to administer and deliver the AIDA program.

I would like the parliamentary secretary if he can to perhaps just stick to the subject, not talk about previous deficits, not talk about previous policies or previous parties and governments, just stick to the questions and the issues that are before him today.

Why not reinstate GRIP and please talk to the administration costs of that program.

[Supply, April 4th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, to the member who just spoke, I find it interesting that there is a party now in the House that would like to distance itself so quickly from its previous name that members are standing constantly and saying there is another name and they must distance ourselves immediately from that party formerly known as the Reform Party. It is very interesting that they not only distance themselves from their name, but from their leader, their party and their principles.

The issue of the day obviously is audits. The hon. member said that performance audits are a very integral part of management as we know it today in our society. It is true by the way. I am very familiar with performance and proficiency audits.

The member also said that in previous governments it was seen that those departments were not acting in a proper manner. Certainly the performance audits being brought in now are the ones now functioning in a proper fashion.

Can the member then answer please why it is that some of those performance audits I have been asking for from other departments are not forthcoming from his government? They are not forthcoming and access to information seems to be the only way to get those particular audits. Is there some reason why this member feels that transparency was only good in this government and not in previous governments? Why can I not get my audits?

[Supply, April 4th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, listening to the minister, she gives the impression to me and to Canadians in general that there is a process that is currently being followed by the government that in fact if there is an auditor's report then the government will table that report within a very short period of time.

I asked for a Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food audit. The deputy minister at the beginning of March said I would have access to that audit, but I am still waiting for it. I find that the best way to access the audits of the government is through access to information.

Is the impression to be that, in fact, all audits are automatically given to the opposition and to the House?

[Supply, April 4th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Elk Island is absolutely correct. I would like to indicate to the member for Elk Island that the members who spoke are from the Progressive Conservative Party rather than that other party, but we support the motion before us today.

I agree. To simply refer to this as vexatious speaks to the attitude of the government when it says because we question the ability for other members, opposition members as well as backbench members, to get information on a particular department that we are interfering with the operations of the government. That is not correct. We must make the government and bureaucrats accountable for public dollars that are spent.

To be perfectly honest, I am surprised that the Liberals will not stand up and support this. It is just good management. It is good management tactics that are done in any private or public corporation. Why the government would hide audits, hide access to those audits or not allow those audits to be available to members of parliament really disturbs me. It is saying that it will reward inefficient management, it will not question it and it will continue in the same fashion it has been doing over the last seven years.

The member for Elk Island is absolutely correct. The terms that have been used by the government should not be used with respect to this particular motion.

[Supply, April 4th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to this supply day motion from the party formerly known as Reform. In fact the motion should have been put forward. I heard a previous speaker from the New Democratic Party suggest that it was unnecessary to bring the issue before the House and that there were other priorities and other issues that we could be talking about which certainly had a greater resonance now with Canadians.

I disagree to a certain extent because this issue certainly does resonate with Canadians. It speaks to the specific management capabilities of the government of the country to control and put into place the necessary services required by Canadians. There has to be some control over that either in the House with parliamentarians or with administrators at the top of departments.

I am a fan of internal efficiency audits. If I can go back a bit into a previous lifetime when I was involved in municipal politics, my administrator of the day and I set up a complete process by which we would identify specific departments within that municipal entity and then put into place internal efficiency audits.

Why we did that was not to witch hunt. We did not suggest that we or outside auditors could do the job any better. We looked at the operations with different eyes, especially operations that have been in place for a long time. Whether it be municipal governments, provincial governments or the federal government, there is a tendency, if the bureaucracy has been in place for a while, to do the job by taking the path of least resistance.

The path of least resistance may not necessarily be the best way to attain the necessary efficiencies within the department. Bringing in outside eyes allows someone else to see how better the operation could run. It is not a witch hunt. It is simply a matter of listing the way the job is completed now, the numbers of steps that have to be taken for necessary approval processes and perhaps identifying ways of doing the job better.

That is what happens in the federal government with the auditor general's department. I am a fan of the auditor general. Mr. Desautels does his job extremely well. Members of his staff are extremely competent. When they go into a department they do not go in for a witch hunt. They go in simply to look at the operations and say what could be done better or what could be done in a different fashion.

A lot of what has been said today in the House has a tendency to focus on HRDC because it has been the audit that has been put forward with the most regularity over the last two months and has identified certain deficiencies within the particular department.

HRDC is just one of the departments within the federal bureaucracy. Let me give a little example. The auditor general, Mr. Desautels, appeared before the agriculture committee last week. Four specific departments of agriculture were there. Mr. Desautels and his staff went through the audit with us as members of that committee and highlighted some of the areas where we could improve upon the service delivery of those departments, whether it be on cost recovery, which we have talked about in the House at great length in terms of agriculture, or whether it be an accounting process which in fact would bring forward some deficiencies within the department.

When the committee questioned the departments it was given some commitments from those departmental heads, which I expected to have regardless. We had an audit. We showed them the deficiencies. They were responsible to put into place in their departments changes within their operations to try to comply with those recommendations. They told us as committee members, as parliamentarians, that they would comply with those recommendations.

I asked the auditor general a question and he said that he was very glad to hear that the departments would comply with those recommendations. I was a bit shocked because I assumed it was automatic that the departments would follow the auditor general's recommendations and make the necessary changes, but that is not the way the system works. There has to be a watchdog. There has to be a backstop. The parliamentarians in committee are the watchdog and the backstop.

I was pleased to be able to say to the departmental heads that we would follow up on it on a regular basis over the next 12 months and that we would insist their operations become more efficient. The auditor general certainly thanked us for the job we performed in the whole process.

The motion today speaks specifically to that requirement of parliamentarians. It simply says that when we have an internal efficiency audit we must make sure the audit is tabled with the committee within 30 days of its being presented to the department.

I cannot for the life of me understand why any member of the sitting government would not agree with that. It is their job as well as our job to make sure that internal audits which give efficiency reports are seen and are acted upon. To hide them or not to react to them is a dereliction of duty. It is an abdication of duty. It is necessary that those reports be tabled, so why would the government not agree on its own behalf to ensure proper timeline and the process?

When we did internal audits at the municipal level we made them available to the department to put forward its comments on the recommendations. We then took the audits, the recommendations from the auditor and the reports from the departmental heads on the way they would comply with the recommendations, to council and ultimately to the public. Those were done in a necessary process. The public demands and the public deserves to know exactly how services are being delivered and that the money is being expended in an efficient manner. That is all the motion speaks to.

All the motion says is that when we do an internal audit, which we want to have, with which we agree and which we say Mr. Desautels has the mandate, the right and the requirement to put forward to the public, we should ask him to bring it forward to the departments. That is fair ball. It should be taken to HRDC, to agriculture, to finance, to the treasury board, to defence or to any department he wants to, so that the departments can look at the recommendations, put their comments forward and in 30 days report the audit back to committee. Where better can we deal with an audit than publicly at a committee table? There is absolutely no reason the government should oppose that type of resolution.

My hon. colleague from Kings—Hants spoke eloquently with respect to the private-public requirements and to the fact that as a federal government we were the watchdogs of the public purse. That is the absolute essence of what the audit speaks to, the watchdog of the public purse.

If the government is not prepared to bring forward audits in a timely fashion then it is saying that we as parliamentarians should not be the watchdog of the public purse. That is wrong, absolutely wrong. I would ask hon. members to support the resolution as in fact our party will support it.

Let us talk just briefly about access to information.

Access to information has been a very important tool for us and members of other parties. We require access to information because the departments have not been forthcoming when we have asked for information with respect to audits and other information. I would prefer not to have to file another access to information request in my life in parliament. Then I could honestly say to my constituents and other constituents in this great country that there is openness and transparency.

Earlier it was said that access and transparency are probably the two most overworked words in parliament and I agree. We should be working toward correcting the inefficiencies and making sure it is open and accessible.

[Supply, April 4th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I agree with much of what the hon. member said. He suggested that the audit process is a vital tool for management to bring forward, with different eyes, through the auditor general, efficiency audits to identify some of the inefficiencies within the departments.

Recently the auditor general appeared before the agriculture committee with three organizations, three departments of government. The auditor general told the committee that it was necessary that committees be there to get the commitments from the departments in order that the departments follow what the auditor general puts in his reports.

Why does the hon. member have difficulty having those audits tabled within 30 days of their presentation to the departments?

[Questions On The Order Paper, March 31st, 2000]

What is the total cost to taxpayers of the Prime Minister's task force on the four western provinces announced on January 7, 1999, including, but not limited to, costs for staff, travel, advertising, room rentals and per diems for members?