Madam Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to address this do over budget, the whoops we made a mistake in the first one budget so we will try again, the back of a napkin, Buzz Hargrove, NDP deal in a hotel room.
I want to outline the difference in philosophy between the socialist corruption alliance and the Conservative Party philosophy. Our party believes there has to be a reason to take tax dollars away from Canadians.
I want to relate a story and the hon. member across the way was instructing me as to why we could not have tax relief. He told me that the reason why we could not have tax relief was if a $100 tax credit were given to every Canadian, it would cost so many billions and if a $200 tax credit, it would cost double that.
I asked him what was the problem with that? He said the question was, did every Canadian deserve a $200 tax cut? That sums it up. For the Liberals, ordinary working Canadians have to justify keeping their own money. They have to go to the government with a reason why they have to keep their hard earned dollars. Then the Liberals will sit there, judge and say that they will let some people keep a little more of their money but others they will not.
The Conservative Party thinks it is the exact opposite. We have to go to Canadians and provide a justification for why the government needs their money. It has to go to specific essential services. The Liberals view it as their private chequing account, that Canadians have to go and beg and plead for some of their own money back.
Let us look at a few of the items the government treats as its own private chequing account. There has been a lot of discussion in the past few days about foreign aid. We are sending tax dollars, collected from hard-working Canadians, working families, to China, government to the government. We are funding the most brutal regime on the planet and we are giving them tax dollars. Canada is funding a government that habitually exterminates its own people, wipes out villages, ethnically cleanses parts of its regions, rolls over vast regions such as Tibet. It has missiles pointed at Taiwan. We are giving China direct dollars.
It is not a surprise. We know the Prime Minister's buddies in Power Corporation and Canada Steamship Lines do the bulk of the trade with China. They give money to the government of China directly and then lo and behold CSL and Power Corporation are the beneficiaries of some of the payback.
We look at more millions going into the gun registry. I am not surprised the NDP voted to keep the funding going. We know the position of the leader of the NDP on gun control. It is confiscation. We know, when he was a councillor in the city of Toronto, he advocated central depositories where gun owners would have to leave their guns and sign them in and out like a library card. If they wanted to go hunting on the weekend or if a farmer had some pests around that he wanted to get rid of, they would have to go and sign their guns in and out. How much would that have cost?
It really is no surprise that the NDP leader would support more funding for the gun registry, even though the vast majority of Canadians, certainly 95% of constituents who have contacted my office, have said that they want the program scrapped. They want those dollars put right into front line police officers. This is not going to happen with the government.
The issue of child care is another example of the Liberal philosophy. It is a vicious circle and we are in the middle. The Liberals only see the problem starting at there are many working families which have to have both parents out of the house working and that is creating a problem in looking after their children.
The Liberal solution is to take more of their hard earned tax dollars and put it into a babysitting bureaucracy. They will make Canadians work harder and longer to fund a program they will give only to certain people who fit into that Liberal paradigm, that one size fits all approach. Forget about shift workers. Forget about parents who choose to work opposite ends of the clock in order to be at home and provide that care. Forget about people who use a relative. Only the people who fit in that one size fits all paradigm will benefit from it.
The good news is we will all have to pay for it. Every Canadian, regardless of their child care choice, will have to pay for it. The vast majority of Canadians will pay twice, once for the option of their choice and once again to fund the minister's huge multi-billion dollar scheme. The minister cannot even tell the House how much it will cost. He says he does not know.
Members of his party, child care advocates, say that it will cost between $10 billion and $12 billion, perhaps even as high as $15 billion a year. From where are they going to get the money? Will they hike taxes? Probably. Will they cut services in other areas? Probably. We have a ruling from the Supreme Court saying that the Liberals are certainly not doing a great job on health care, and it goes on.
A TD report released in January, I believe, showed that the gross domestic product in Canada from 1989 to 2004 grew by 25%, but the average take home pay for working Canadians increased by only 3.6%. Working families from 1989 to 2004 got a 3.6% increase in their take home pay. That speaks to a lot of issues such as quality of life. We know inflation goes up at a higher rate than this over that many years. Therefore, Canadians have had a pay cut because they have had to pay more for their services as inflation has gone up. They are keeping less of their money.
The average Canadian family in that time experienced a $1,327 increase in their total tax bill. That is shameful. We are seeing working Canadian families paying more money for fewer services. The quality of service is going down. Proof of that is in the Supreme Court ruling blaming the government for the record of abysmal mismanagement.
We know what NDP deals do to the economy. We have seen the economy in Saskatchewan stagnate. Saskatchewan is a province full of prosperity and natural resources. People are willing to build their province. They are willing to be entrepreneurs and work harder to make their communities better. Yet the government uses their tax dollars to fund wasteful schemes. I think of Spudco, or offshore investments which lose, or dot-coms in Australia and Tennessee which lose hundreds of millions of dollars. It is no surprise to see the federal NDP party starting to do some of the same things, throwing money around without a plan.
This is an important thing to remember. This budget deal is all about unplanned spending. When we go through it, we see some of the things they talk about and all are unaccounted. The minister will be authorized to spend so much money on this and many millions on that,with no plan. The government has thrown a few words in to say that it would like the money to go to something for example like the environment, but there is nothing about how that money will be implemented.
Where have we seen the government throw money at a problem with no coherent plan or vision of how the money will be used to address a problem? The first one that comes to mind is the sponsorship scandal. The reason why half the Liberal Party is under investigation for criminal actions is exactly the same sorts of things. Throwing money at a problem and letting the chips fall where they may resulted in the sponsorship scandal.
The gun registry is a typical Liberal fallacy. If there is a problem, something must be done. This is something, therefore it must be done without any sort of foresight or any thought of watching what the end result might be. That is what we are likely to see here.
We are likely to see a whole bunch of money being thrown at something with no concrete plan in place. It is not surprising. The Minister of Social Development stood in the House and told members he knew he was doing something right because he doubled the money going to Saskatchewan. He specifically said that he did not know where the money was going, but he knew he had doubled it. Therefore, he felt was doing twice as well as before. He cannot even tell the House how many child care spaces will be create.
This is the type of uncontrolled and unplanned spending. It is a horrible thing for responsible government. It is a horrible thing for our parliamentary democracy when government ministers can just spend money without any sort of accountability, implementation plan or evaluation of whether the money got to the right place and if it did the right thing. That is what the essence of the bill is. The NDP is supporting a corrupt government for the sake of being able to say that it threw money at problems.
I would like the NDP to explain that to the residents of my riding and people throughout Canada, who are so ashamed and saddened by what has happened to their government. I would like the NDP to tell them why they are propping up this corrupt government.
