Ken Epp

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, May 19th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I am very honoured to stand in defence of Canadian taxpayers when we talk about the implementation of a Liberal budget bill. I would like to begin my intervention by responding somewhat to what the hon. member for Ajax--Pickering said.

He said that he did not want to trust the democratically elected provincial governments. Canadian taxpayers have had it, first, with their money going to ad scam agencies and then seeing whether they are getting value for their dollar. There is a considerable difference. I am proud to be in a party that will respect the Constitution of Canada. We will not override the constitutional rights and responsibilities of the provinces in order to funnel money directly to people to buy their votes. That is wrong.

Our plan is very reasonable. When we form the government, we will make a deal with the provinces and that deal will include ironclad guarantees that money will go to municipalities for the programs they need, and it is very evident that they need it. That is very evident.

If that member does not trust elected provincial governments, then I do not know what we will do in the country.

We have another problem with the government. Under its watch, we have had the greatest increase ever in Quebec's mood to secede from Canada. That is despicable. Canada is a wonderful country. We all need each other. Quebec needs to be a viable part of our country.

In the next election the separatist members in this place will probably increase their membership because of the fact that the federal government does not respect the constitutional rights and responsibilities of the provinces. Quebec's gripe is the same gripe that western Canada and the Atlantic provinces have. The Liberals insist on, and I will use a seriously bad word, raping the financial abilities of the provinces, the workers and businesses in those provinces and then gingerly giving back money the way it wants to whomever it wants as long as it helps them get another electoral success. That will not happen. I can hardly wait until Canadians give their judgment on that corrupt government.

Bill C-43 is an enigma to me. There are all kinds of promises in it. There are many parts in Bill C-43 to implement different parts of the budget. The Liberals thrive on announcements. They love announcing stuff. They announce the same money over and over again. The Prime Minister and government ministers fly all over the country on the Challenger jet to announce money that has been announced before. There is never any new money. Meanwhile, some farmers on the prairies are literally going broke. This is sad. They are in total despair. Some of them are even taking their own lives because they cannot cope. Meanwhile the government continues to announce money but never pays up.

This legislation announces promised tax reductions. The way those people spin it is in itself a tremendous dishonesty to Canadian taxpayers. The much touted $100 billion tax reduction is over 10 years. Why did the government not say that it was $20 billion and then in little letters say that it would be over 20 years? It is not nearly as much as those members are claiming. As far as an annual budget is concerned, it is $10 billion a year, but most of that money is not effective until five, six or eight years down the road when the Liberals hope to still be in power. We trust they will not be.

The same is true with the tax cuts. Bill C-43 speaks to a reduction of $16 a year or 30¢ a week. I do know what Canadian taxpayers will do with all that money. It goes up a bit to $192 a year, by the year 2009. Why are we talking with such urgency about promoting and passing a budget bill that will not come into effect for another four years in its full impact? By then I hope we have a government that will address the real needs of Canadian taxpayers.

Later today I will be voting in favour of the bill. Some will say that after all the negative things I have said, how can I bring myself to do that? Let me tell a little story.

I was in a restaurant not very long ago and somebody in an adjacent table was quite upset, called the waiter over and asked for a new bowl of soup because there was something in it. I do know what was in it, but it was replaced. I remember when I was a youngster growing up in what at that time was a poor family. We had trouble making ends meet. I remember on more than one occasion there would one of those little black houseflies in our soup. Did we throw out the soup and demand a new one? I hate to admit it, and some members will be grossed out by this, but we took that little old fly very carefully out of the soup. We stirred the soup and we ate it because it was that or nothing.

I will vote for the budget bill today, notwithstanding that there are some flies in it. I will take it because of the good things in it.

The Liberals are such charlatans. They give us a bunch of stuff that we should have, but then they throw in stuff that is totally rejected by Canadian taxpayers and by our party. Instead of using their heads and compromising with us, who have the numbers to sustain them so we could have this Parliament work, they make a deal with the NDP. That is the other bill we will vote on tonight, a bill that we cannot support. Basically they are saying to the Canadian people that they do not want Parliament to work. Instead they make a deal with somebody who does not have enough numbers so they can pass the bill. It will be defeated tonight, I sincerely trust.

However, we will support this bill because of the good things in it. I must pay particular attention to the Atlantic accord. I want to ensure that people understand this deal. The Atlantic accord actually began during the last election campaign. Recognizing the needs of the Atlantic people, our leader said that we would have to ensure that they would become financially self-sufficient. They are proud and hard-working people. They should be allowed to keep the money they earn so they can become self-sufficient. He is the one who started this. Then the Prime Minister chimed in and said that the Liberals would do the same because he wanted to win the election, but he lost a number of seats despite that effort.

Finally, we are getting the government, dragged, kicking and screaming, to agree to the Atlantic accord. If the Liberals would have simply brought that in stand alone legislation, as we have requested over and over again, it could have been passed a couple of months ago. Did they do this? No, they sat on their butts and delayed it. Now they have put it in with a bunch of flies in the soup in order to see whether they could persuade us to vote against it. We will not fall for that trick. We will vote for it because of the Atlantic accord and the fact that Canadian people need that part.

At the same time, we are outright rejecting some of the other parts. They are the flies. When we form the government, we will bring in all the good parts of these budgetary measures, except that we will accelerate the tax cuts and show some assistance to Canadians in a real and tangible way, something that makes a bigger difference to them than 16 lousy dollars a year.

[Points of Order, May 18th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, first of all, my apologies for not sending you a little note because this question also arises from question period.

One of the questions asked by one of the backbenchers over there in my view is a clear violation of Standing Order 18 where it states, “No Member may reflect upon any vote of the House, except for the purpose of moving that such vote be rescinded”.

That question very clearly reflected not on a vote in the House but on one which has not even been held yet. I am amazed that you considered that question to be in order.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, May 16th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I am curious about one thing. The member is urging us to support this budget but this stuff was not in the budget. If we look at the original budget that the Minister of Finance read to the House, these things were not there. I wonder whether he has any concern at all about the fact that the protocol on the budget and budget speeches is being destroyed by the Liberal government.

It used to be that if there was a leak from a budget, the Minister of Finance resigned because it was considered so sacrosanct. Under the Liberals, leaks have become sort of the play of the day. It also used to be that once the finance minister delivered the budget in the House the things that he announced were pretty well written in stone so that businesses and individuals could plan because they knew the new rules.

We now have things in Bill C-48, which were not in the budget, that are massive changes in the spending patterns and the reduction of the amount that is attributed to the reduction of our debt and he is saying that we ought to support the bill. In a sense, he is supporting a totally ad hoc procedure in terms of government budgeting, which I do not think is worthy in our country.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, May 16th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I will just take a millisecond to once again thank those wonderful people behind those glass cages who do our instant interpretation. Being a unilingual Canadian, I could not communicate with my hon. colleague across the way without their services.

In answer to the question, yes, I am indeed totally surprised that the NDP have bought into this. It is in fact a bill of nothing. In the worst possible case, if we do have a substantial surplus and based on the way the Liberals have failed to actively project the surpluses, there probably will be a surplus quite a bit in excess of what they are saying--that has always happened before--but we do not know how much it will be. Instead of applying it to reduce the debt and to manage the tax reductions in such a way as to build the economy and help poor people get more jobs and so on, there would be these make peace, throw money at some project by the government. It is totally ill advised.

When the Speaker puts the question on this bill, even if it were not on the question of whether or not we should have an election, I would still quite happily vote against the budget. It is a failure.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, May 16th, 2005]

The short answer, Mr. Speaker, is a three letter word. The answer is yes. I understood that fully well; I think I even mentioned in my speech that we are talking about keeping only $2 billion and everything above that is going to be spent on these initiatives.

I think it is absurd, because if we have a program it is going to cost some money. For the government to just say that it will put only as much money as it has left over to the program, that would be another absurd way of building a house, would it not?

For example, I could say, “We are going to build a new house, family, and next year I am going to make so much in my wages and whatever we have left over we will apply to the house”. As members know, I may land up just barely starting the foundation and not getting anywhere.

It is just another boondoggle in the making, where there is an uncertain amount of money being targeted and thrown at an uncertain number of projects. I think that is very clear.

I am surprised that the NDP members would buy into this, because it so fraught with uncertainty that it obviously will go nowhere and all of their victory and all of their rejoicing over this deal is going to come to naught, totally.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, May 16th, 2005]

It is a real concern.

At any rate, we have here another problem, which is huge, that is, this is a government which, having listened to the NDP arguments, has written down on a piece of paper “we are willing to throw some money at it”. This is so typical of this government. It always measures what it is doing in terms of how many dollars it has thrown at the problem. The Liberals never measure the actual outcome of these effects. It is absolutely incredible that they are doing this.

Mr. Speaker, you would not do this. I would not do it. Let us say I decide that I want to build a house. I have never done that in my life, but if I were to build a house I would not first of all say “this is how much money I am going to spend” and then go and figure out how I can spend all the money. I would probably sit down with my wife and my children and ask, “What kind of a house do we need?” Then, having identified the need and what kind of house we want, how large it is, where it is going to be, et cetera, we would determine how much money we would need.

Instead, these guys start out by just naming a sum. The Liberals do this over and over again; whether it is international affairs or whatever, they talk like that. I think of the gun registry as the best example of them saying, “Let us just throw some money at it”. Once they started throwing it, it went more and more. I like math, so I do a little ratio and proportion and things such as that at an elementary level. I did a small computation. The gun registry was first promised to cost $2 million net. It has landed up now approaching $2 billion. That is 1,000 times as much.

I did a couple of comparisons. Here are two of them. Not long ago, about three years ago, I went and bought myself a new car, a mini-car, a small Honda Civic. It came to around $18,000.

Let us imagine, though, if this would have happened. I say okay to the dealer and tell him I am going to buy this car for $18,000. “It is a lot of money, but I am going to spend it”, I say. I go to pick up that car and he says, “Sorry, we made a little miscalculation. There is an administration fee on doing the book work and it is now going to cost $18 million because that is the proportion of the difference”. On an $18,000 car going up to $18 million, I would say, “Sorry, I decline. Let me out of this”.

But over there is a Liberal government that says it does not matter. The Liberals say they will just keep throwing more money at it and hope that eventually it is all going to work out.

My time is up so I hope that some of the members here have some questions for me and I will be able to enlarge on some other points as well.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, May 16th, 2005]

He was double-crossed. He was betrayed. I could use all sorts of words, but I do not want to get into that area, Mr. Speaker, where you are going to have to stand instead of me.

The member was really upset. Why would the government, having made the commitment to bring in a bill, then renege on it after getting the NDP to do its part?

Right now we have this deal where the NDP has said, “We will vote and support this corrupt Liberal government in return for some promises in the budget”. But it is common knowledge that we cannot trust these guys. This Liberal government will never deliver to the NDP even if this budget passes. These are all just empty promises.

In fact, Bill C-48 starts with these words: “An Act to authorize the Minister of Finance to make certain payments”. That is the heading of the bill. It just “authorizes” him, which is a whole other topic that I could talk about in terms of the wide open spending that this bill permits.

It is really a very short bill, but basically what it says is that the Minister of Finance “may”--it does not say that he “shall”--in respect of this year “make payments out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund”. It is basically everything over $2 billion in excess of government spending. If the government had a $2 billion surplus only, then there would be zero there. Also, even if there were a $4 billion surplus and it looked as if that would commit $2 billion in the next two years each for this particular budget program, it still says the minister “may”. It does not say he “shall” and these NDP members have fallen for it. I should not laugh. I should not do that--

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, May 16th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it was interesting just before question period to hear the hon. member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell give an impassioned speech about his years in the House. I have not been here as long as he has, and unfortunately I was not recognized by the Chair in order to also give a short intervention during that time when really we did not talk about the bill before us at all. We talked about the member's service.

When he was talking it reminded me of my own parliamentary career, which I am happy to announce will not be ending at this election as opposed to that of the hon. member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell. I remember that when I was first elected we had a government at the time which, still fending off the Liberal debt it inherited in 1984, was still engaging in debt and borrowing. In the 1993 election campaign, when computers were just barely invented, I had a little computer running that showed the rate at which the debt was increasing. It was increasing at around a thousand and some dollars per second, which made for an interesting display on the screen.

Of course I pointed out to the people who I thought would vote for me that we were not doing our duty in terms of preserving the well-being, financial and otherwise, of our children and grandchildren in allowing that kind of debt to grow. It is very interesting that at that time our youngest son was younger than these young people here who serve as our pages. Now he is almost a old man. He is not really, he is a only little over 30, but that is certainly old compared to the young people we have serving us here as pages, about 50% older.

My wife and I had only one grandson at that time. Now we have five grandchildren. I think that this particular bill we are talking about today, Bill C-48, is a colossal failure and takes us right back to the passion that I felt in 1993 to manage properly the finances of our country on behalf of our children, grandchildren and all subsequent generations.

It occurs to me that the reason for this budget bill, Bill C-48, is totally ill informed. I would like to use a few minutes of my time to give some free advice to the NDP members. I would bet I will not get an ounce of protest from them today when I say anything here. I am going to give them some advice and just inform them how ill advised they are to make a deal with the Prime Minister.

They are hoping that they are going to get all this expenditure and here we have Bill C-48, which basically is the NDP side of this budget. They have cut a deal with the Prime Minister in order to try to get this deal. I am amazed that they would do that.

Now I have a little sidebar, as have nowadays in our lexicon. There was a private member's bill before the House under the auspices of John Bryden, who was a previous Liberal member, on access to information and the revision of that law. It was a good bill and we would have supported it, but unfortunately it died on the order paper.

It was then brought in by an NDP member from Winnipeg in pretty well identical form to what the previous Parliament saw. The member from Winnipeg made a deal with the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister said to him that the government was going to bring in legislation that would pretty well reflect the member's bill and asked that the member withdraw his bill, saying that the government would go ahead with its own.

In good faith, that NDP member said okay, He withdrew his private member's bill on access to information. What happened? About six months or eight months later, the Minister of Justice showed up at our committee. We were all anticipating that he was going to show us at least some draft legislation on what the bill would look like.

Instead, what we got was a great big long report on a new discussion paper, which means that we are going to start talking about it again. Needless to say, the member from Winnipeg was somewhat miffed.

[Canadian Forces Members and Veterans Re-establishment and Compensation Act, May 10th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. If I were in a position to give you advice, which of course I am not, I would advise you that this is a matter of considerable importance because it is precedent setting.

It is true that in this particular instance the vote was not close, but how about the next time if it is? And then to get up and argue that the vote should count anyway because it counted this morning in this particular instance. That vote should, notwithstanding that the minister is not here, in fact be disqualified.

[Committees of the House, May 9th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, there have been times in my observation of the member opposite who spoke in the last number of years when I have had small glimpses of hope for him and some respect. However, his speech today was such a disaster when we think about what he was saying. He was saying that this Parliament should not ever have confidence in the government. All we want is to ask is this. Is there confidence in the government? There certainly has been no confidence in the government by the Canadian people in the last little while, judging by the things I have heard, and Parliament is supposed to reflect that.

Parliamentary procedure has always provided that the government has to have the confidence of the House of Commons. Now It does not and it is running scared. The hon. member is trying to twist it to make people think it is the Leader of the Opposition who has messed things up around here.

I invite him to stop to think about what led us to this place. It is the deal the Liberals have made with the NDP, which puts our economy at tremendous risk because of the unplanned, totally willy-nilly spending that they have embarked on of some $5 billion or $6 billion. It is a weekend deal, written on a napkin. There is no thought given to what ramifications that will have on our economy and to the well-being of our country. How can we support a government that goes down that track?

We are simply saying, let us ask the question whether Canadians and this Parliament have confidence in the government. The Liberals made the deal with the wrong people.

The Liberals got around 36% of the votes cast. That is around 20% of eligible voters who voted for the Liberals. Now they say that they will jam down their throats something that the majority of them clearly do not want. They have used a parliamentary procedure, taking away our supply day motions. What will they do? Anybody that is put into a corner will try to solve the problem. The Liberals have created the problem and now they are trying to cast the blame on someone else.

That is despicable and I invite the hon. member to get up and apologize for his ill-advised speech and say that the Liberals will do better from now on.