Madam Speaker, I will be dividing my time with the member for Regina-Lumsden.
It has been just over a week since we all trooped off to the other place to be subjected to 20 minutes of vacuity, the exercise so aptly described by Ottawa Sun columnist Joe O'Donnell as the drone from the throne.
I envied the handful of napping Liberal senators who took the opportunity to catch up on a little sleep. On my feet and pressed against that brass rail I did not have that option.
The government came out swinging in this throne speech with a promise to double the number of federal summer jobs for students. There will not be a dandelion left standing on a single federal lawn from sea to sea to sea. If only this government would cease to suck the life out of our national economy, young people would be able to find real jobs instead of relying on this son of the Company of Young Canadians or whatever it is the government has in mind.
The government then proposed to introduce another business subsidy boondoggle, this time for environmental technologies, biotechnology and the aerospace industry. Will this be a continuation of the de Havilland-Boeing-Bombardier saga? The word on the street is that there is $300 million in pork which will be available to those with the appropriate Liberal and Quebec connections.
Within the throne speech there is one little paragraph on criminal justice. There is a reference to "innovative alternatives to incarceration of low risk offenders". I wonder if this means more experimental facilities like the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge in my riding.
The women currently living there have all committed very serious crimes. The most common sentence among them is life-10. The concept of gentle handling as a means of rehabilitating them may have some merit. I do not question that. However, do they have to be accommodated in facilities that are much finer than anything available to many of the law-abiding, hard working, tax paying farmers and ranchers in the surrounding area? Social injustice cuts both ways. In case anyone has forgotten, this country is broke.
The capital cost of this penal Taj Mahal was $9 million, $300,000 per inmate at full capacity. The annual operating cost will be $86,000 per inmate if the place operates within its budget, which my sources tell me is highly unlikely. This year the cost per inmate will be astronomical because to date Correctional Services Canada has been able to find only 14 serious offenders whom it believes can safely be kept in this open facility with 26 staff members on duty.
Few people will mourn the closure of the old women's prison in Kingston, but surely there has to be a common sense middle ground where people can be treated humanely without ripping off the long suffering taxpayer.
On the day following the throne speech we heard the expanded version. We were treated to an hour by the Prime Minister who delivered the same message with a few rhetorical embellishments. He said that the government had broken the back of the deficit, which brings to mind a certain Mr. Trudeau's famous remark: "We have wrestled inflation to the ground". Remember that one?
If cutting the deficit by a third is breaking its back, I am in desperate need of language lessons. If the Prime Minister had said the country is going down the drain more slowly than when the Tories were in power, that would have been an honest statement and I would have applauded wildly.
The Prime Minister made one sensible comment in his speech when he said: "Government does not create jobs. It creates the climate for the private sector to create jobs". It is the epiphany, the Prime Minister's conversion on the road to the next election. Does this really mean that we can all look forward to an end to pork barrel politics, bloated regional development agencies and $6 billion infrastructure programs that provide neither useful infrastructure nor long term jobs? If I could use another biblical reference, that would be equivalent to the second coming or perhaps the congelation of the inferno.
The Prime Minister then went on to state that his government is prepared to withdraw from certain areas of provincial jurisdiction. He has obviously been doing some serious reading of the Reform policies. Out with the red book, in with the 20/20 program. My cup runneth over.
If the Prime Minister would like a Reform Party membership, I would be more than happy to forward his $10 to our Calgary office. However, I am afraid his application would be refused since he still does not believe in nor even understands the concept of fiscal responsibility. He is apparently unconcerned that our national debt of $578,288,000,000 is growing by $1,036.26 each second of this day and that our per capita national debt at 7.46 a.m. was $19,439.56. That is unconscionable.
