Ken Epp

[Constitution Amendment, 2005, February 15th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I admire my colleague for taking this on and it is fitting since today is the anniversary of the first flight of our Canadian flag. Most of us in our private member's bills hit some little issue somewhere. He said he would propose a motion to actually amend our Constitution and so he is a big thinker.

I would like to express to him though some concerns that I have on a broader scale, and that is the fact that democracy really only works if there are checks and balances. Obviously, this one, having fallen into disuse, and we recognize that our sovereign, the Queen, and jolly old England probably do not have an active role anymore in determining what becomes law in this country.

At the same time though we have a deterioration of that democratic accountability in our own country. The example that came to my mind was the vote that carried quite handily here in the House of Commons in June 1999 in which we agreed that the government would not change the definition of marriage. Yet, in subsequent years, in the short five or six years, we have seen both the courts and the government ignore that vote of Parliament.

I do not know if it is fair to say that they were in contempt of Parliament, but they certainly did make decisions. They violated a vote of Parliament, so there is that accountability factor. On the other hand, what my colleague is proposing to do would not have in any way affected that, at least I do not think so.

I am inclined right now to support the motion and I encourage him. I hope that the members opposite are going to think likewise. I have an idea that the Liberals on command will vote against this because of some reason that they will conjure up in their minds. I would like the member's comments on that.

[Supply, February 15th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I find this quite interesting. I would like to congratulate my colleague for an excellent speech, and I would like to make a comment on the words we heard from the other side.

The member opposite asked what we were going to do. One thing we will not do is tell families that they can have whatever choice they want, but they will have the dickens taxed out of them to fund one system. Why say to them that they will have choice and then load them up with taxes for the cost of a one choice system to the point where they have no choice?

I think our system would be much better. We would empower individual families to choose the care that would be best for their own children, including the possibility of one of the parents staying home to look after them. This can be done with refundable tax credits. There are many different ways in which it can be done.

The motion today says that it will be accomplished. The details probably are not worked out at this stage, but it is a goal that is worth pursuing. It is way better than a plan which says that they will be charged for a system as chosen by the government and they can choose whether to use it or not, or if they can afford it, they can go somewhere else.

[Supply, February 15th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, as my colleague was talking about the years gone past, it certainly reminded me of our situation. My wife and I were married before the time of technological on-off switches for when babies were born and so our family started growing within a year.

We made the decision then that my wife would be a full time mom. At that time we could afford it. My annual income was about $5,300, as I recall, and my taxes were about $25 or $30 a month. When we compare that to what families have to face nowadays, we see that a proportion of income that goes to taxation is a hundred times as big now as it was then. Our incomes are maybe ten times as big.

The fact is that it is high taxes that are driving a lot of parents into the workforce and to find other care for their children. That has been our experience and I think that it is probably true when 70% of parents say that if they had the choice they would like to stay home with their families. Therefore, increasing the taxes so that those people who go to work have to pay even more taxes to fund this, does not solve that particular problem. The money must go to the families.

I would like my colleague to comment on that particular point of view.

[The Senate, February 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am sick and tired of the Prime Minister saying that he supports Senate reform, but keeps hiding behind not on a piecemeal basis.

Albertans are asking for no change at all: continue to name senators from a list of candidates. All they ask is that the list he uses is the one they have given him by a democratic vote. They do not accept this arrogant, top down attitude of the Prime Minister knowing better than Albertans who they want to represent them in the Senate.

Why does the Prime Minister not stop being so chicken and simply fill the Alberta vacancies from the people's list?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2004, No. 2, February 4th, 2005]

Yes, and Peterson before that and NDP and Liberal governments. It is wonderful that this has happened.

However I would not in any way want to minimize the contributions made by the other provinces as well, including Quebec, eastern Canada and Saskatchewan, from which I escaped a number of years ago. Each one of those provinces have successful businesses, entrepreneurs and many workers. They all send income tax in truckloads to Ottawa. It is incumbent upon the Government of Canada in our national capital to manage taxpayer money as a sacred trust.

It certainly is true that we need to adopt fiscal policies that promote a vibrant and healthy economy. In this battle of who should get the credit, there is no doubt in my mind that the provinces and the provincial governments, in what they do and the policies they have, are absolutely critical to the economic well-being of our country.

However they can start a fire but a Liberal government in Ottawa can do a lot of damage by pouring water on that economic fire. It is unfortunate the Liberals have shut it down.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2004, No. 2, February 4th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to broaden the comments made by my hon. colleague from Prince Albert.

It is true that the economies of Alberta and Ontario have been successful, especially in Alberta. It is a combination, I believe, of a good Conservative government with sound fiscal management. If we look at the challenges that Mike Harris' Conservative government in Ontario had in recovering from the disaster brought on by the Bob Rae--

[Budget Implementation Act, 2004, No. 2, February 4th, 2005]

And the military.

They took this surplus out of the fund just because they said there was a surplus in it so then it was theirs. But that is not accurate. Those contributions come half from the employer, in other words the government or the taxpayers of the country, and half from the employees themselves, because they contribute to their pensions.

When the Liberals took that $30 billion unilaterally from the civil servants of our country, our wonderful civil servants and our military people, they actually took money to which they were not entitled. If we take half of that, half of the $30 billion is another $15 billion. So there we have the $45 billion from the EI fund and the $15 billion in excess taken back out of the surplus from the pension fund, and there is the $60 billion.

In other words, the Liberals have not done a thing in terms of making the actual operations of government more efficient. They have merely taken money that they were not entitled to and applied it to the debt. And there they are, standing up and crowing about how wonderful they are because they have made such fantastic achievements in the financial end.

I submit that this government cannot be found guilty of good fiscal management. If charged with being guilty of good fiscal management, they would win the case: they are not guilty.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2004, No. 2, February 4th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, what an excellent question and what a wonderful opportunity to lead up to another lesson for the Liberal government.

The hon. member asking the question made allusion to the fact that the Liberals got their $60 billion by which they have reduced the debt, perhaps a lot of it, from the EI surplus.

I want to emphasize this: the EI fund is to be an insurance program, as intended in the legislation. In fact, I think if we had an impartial court and were to plead the case, we could almost accuse the Liberals there, and probably win the case, of them having absconded with money to which they were not legally entitled. I do not like to use the other words that we sometimes use, but they took money to which they were not legally entitled.

It is interesting that the chief actuary has said over the years that when the surplus in the fund reaches $15 billion, that is sufficient. Yet these Liberals have kept accepting overpayments into it in huge amounts to the tune of $45 billion.

I have another number for members, though, and I do not know if many members here recall, but it is only about four or five years ago that we had a bill in the House in which the government took out of the civil service pension fund another $30 billion.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2004, No. 2, February 4th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I had totally not intended to speak in this debate. I know that some people are eager to get out of here, but I could not let this debate stop where it is.

The parliamentary secretary made a statement and the Liberals are trying to pin our country's debt on Brian Mulroney and the Conservatives at that time. I tried to do that in 1993 when I was running for Parliament against the local Conservative candidate as well as the Liberal. The fact of the matter is that Brian O'Kurley, who was a member of Parliament during that time, got up during the all candidates debates and he kept on saying that in 1984 the Conservatives had inherited this debt from the Liberals. He said that the Conservatives had a balanced budget on program spending and that they did not spend more on programs than the money they took in.

I believe in dealing honestly with people. As I said before, being a mathematician I checked the figures out. Since this issue has come up this afternoon, I got out my little scientific calculator which I never leave home without, and I calculated the numbers.

I do not know whether the numbers given from the other side are accurate. Unfortunately, I do not remember the exact debt way back in those years, but I am going to use the numbers that the member used. I will accept that in 1984 the debt was $198 billion on the premise that he is correct and that it grew to $498 billion. Those are the numbers that he used. We will use those for this illustration.

The ratio of that debt is about two and a half times. In other words it grew in nine years to two and a half times its original size. All we have to do is take the ninth root of two to find out the interest rate. That is exactly what I did in just a few seconds. It comes to 10.7916749 to be precise, but it is basically 10.8%. That was the going interest rate during those years.

We could say that the Liberals over a number of years spent way more money on programs and waste than they took in. They borrowed money year after year. The debt grew to $198 billion by 1984 when the Liberals were properly turfed out.

Then the Conservatives had a short time of nine years during which they balanced the budget. They did not spend more on programs. As I said before, they could be held accountable for not attacking the debt and the deficit sooner. We could say that, but the amount of the deficit every year was equal to the interest payable on that debt that they had inherited. That is the fact.

The sum of $198 billion compounded annually at 10.8% over nine years is worth $498 billion. It is a shameful Liberal legacy that we have in our national debt.

The Liberals like to crow that they have brought this under control. I remind members that in 1993 when we first stood on this side and started hammering them on the deficit and the debt, we were called every unsavoury name in the English language, and probably the French language too. I guess that is one time I was glad I did not understand French, when they were calling us all sorts of names.

The Liberals were really ripping into us because we were so un-Canadian. We wanted to stop the spending and the borrowing which was putting our future generations into more debt. The Liberals finally came around.

Herb Grubel was our finance critic at that time. He wrote a very fascinating book when he retired from politics after one term. One of the things that he confessed in his book was that from time to time the finance minister, now the Prime Minister, would say to him privately, “Keep up the pressure. I have so much pressure from within my party to keep spending a bunch of money. I know that for the good of this country we need to bring down the debt”.

So the Prime Minister, then the finance minister, did bring down the debt, but it was at the pressure of the then Reform Party, and he was asking for that pressure because he needed the legitimization of his point of view.

I want to point out another thing. The Liberals keep crowing about how well they have done in managing the finances. When we look at the $1 billion or $2 billion they spend just at the flip of a finger on a gun registry or at the money wasted in an ad scam and all of the other mismanagement of the government, let us just think about how much we could have done if they had managed the money properly.

There is another point. In 1993 the Liberals were campaigning against free trade. The effect of free trade in this country right now is a huge financial gain. I think it is $1.5 billion every day. They spoke against it. If it were not for the implementation of free trade by the then Conservative government, would we be, even now, in the position that we are in? The Liberals themselves admit that our debt is down as a percentage of GDP. The debt has gone down by only a very small amount relative to its size when they took over, but they take the ratio of the GDP, and because the GDP has grown substantially, mostly due to free trade, obviously the debt is down as a percentage of the GDP.

I do not want to take a whole lot of time here, but I just could not allow these misconceptions to go unchallenged. I want to just simply say that in the end to the taxpayers I guess that looking backward is not going to help them a lot. We cannot drive a semi, as I did for many years, by looking in the rear-view mirror.

Let us stop trying to place the blame, maybe, but let us place it correctly if we are. Rather, let us rather look ahead. I am saying this simply. We need to implement in our policies plans that will reduce the debt and the deficit so that we have smaller interest payments and more money available--instead of less--to spend on the programs that Canadians value.

We need to make sure that we manage government properly and honestly and that there is not all of this waste, mismanagement and corruption. I hate to use that word, but it is very evident in the present milieu of the inquiry by Mr. Justice Gomery. There is so much evidence now that there is actual corruption in there. It has to stop. I call on Canadians very frankly to turf this government, because the Liberals will not wake up to the moral challenge before them until they have what we call for our grandchildren “a time out”. I think it is time that the Liberals got a time out.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2004, No. 2, February 4th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to listen to the member. In previous times he was probably the best House leader that the Liberal Party has ever had. I would like to congratulate him for some very good work in this Parliament.

I have a couple of comments that I would like to make about his speech, one which I really want to emphasize.

The Liberals love to say, as he did again, that it was during the time of a Conservative government that the national debt rose at unprecedented levels. The mathematics of that is true, but all one has to do is look at the exponential curve on the growth of the debt if no payments are made toward it. I have taught mathematics, and I did the mathematics on this.

In 1993 I ran against a Conservative candidate and a Liberal candidate. The Liberal was way back when the polling was finally done. It was during that time when I did this math. The Conservative candidate said that the Conservatives had not added, through any program borrowing, any money to the debt. Over the nine years of their mandate, they had a balanced budget on program expenditures.

I checked this because I argued with this guy on the hustings. Having a little knowledge of math and finance, I checked it out and he was right spot on.

If we look at the debt the Conservatives inherited from the Liberals in 1984 and look at the debt in 1993, it is almost exactly equal to the amount of debt that the Liberals left them with accumulated interest. One could say that the Conservatives were in error in not addressing that debt more quickly. However, that is like saying an archer has shot an arrow and it is somebody else's fault it met its mark because somebody else should have caught that arrow in the air. It was a difficult time.

I would like to correct the member on that. It was not the Conservative's fault. It was a Liberal inherited debt from years past that caused this, and we are still burdened under it.

I would like the member's response, if he has one.