Gary Goodyear

[Petitions, June 27th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to present on behalf of my riding of Cambridge a petition that does not look like it will go very far and will fall on the deaf ears of the Liberal government. It calls on the government to support and uphold the current definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.

[Civil Marriage Act, June 27th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I have sat in the House and watched the member get up and profess to have made a certain decision on this issue. Yet when opportunities presented themselves to vote the bill down through political maneuvering, in which the Liberal Party is the well known strategist when it comes from behind with the dirty deeds, the gentleman did not put his money where his mouth is.

Why has the Liberal Party chosen to dictate the direction of the morality of the country? I think on page 85 of the youth Liberal policy platform, who are the up and coming leaders in the Liberal Party, the intention is to legalize prostitution next.

This morning we discussed raising the sexual consent to 16. However, the Liberals did not think that is necessary. Let us leave it at 14. Perhaps in a couple of years it will be 12 or 8. I wonder if we will legalize prostitution if 14-year-old prostitutes are legal.

The member conveniently speaks against homosexual marriage but does nothing about it.

What about the religious freedom of the cabinet ministers in the Liberal Party who are not allowed to vote their conscience when it comes to this? Frankly, I heard one of the ministers opposite tell the Catholic community to sit down and shut up. Guess what? The position I hear from the member opposite is empty and it means nothing. Quit wasting our time, let us move on.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to make Certain Payments, June 23rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member stands up and says things like the Conservatives do not support homes for the homeless, which is completely false and misleading to the House. What the Conservative Party has had a concern with is the continual promises made and promises broken.

I would like to ask the hon. member two questions, please. First, the last time the Liberal government gave out billions of dollars for homes for the homeless and less fortunate, it did not amount to that many beds. I would like to ask the hon. member, with $1.6 billion, exactly how many beds are going to be produced? I suggest that it is not a good bang for the taxpayers' bucks.

Second, calculated invocation of closure tonight shut down the voices of my riding. My riding is not allowed to speak tonight in this supposedly democratic forum. How does he feel about that? That is what I would like to ask the hon. member.

[Taxation, June 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, school boards in Ontario and Quebec took the Liberal government to court to prove they should be exempt from GST on the cost of transporting our children. The courts agreed and a final settlement was made, and all sides accepted it.

Guess what? The Minister of Finance then retroactively changed the law and now refuses to respect the ruling of the courts.

Why is the minister playing games with the rules of law in the country instead of paying the school boards of Ontario and Quebec what the government owes them?

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, June 20th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I do not believe there was a question there, just more rhetoric from the opposite side of the House.

Again I hear this issue about 1% of spending. We really do have to tell the truth to Canadians. this budget has no plan behind $4.6 billion. Then there was this pre-election campaign spending of $25 billion in promises by the Prime Minister. When Bay Street sees the $25 billion plus this potentially contingent $4.6 billion, which sounds to me like promises made, promises likely to be broken, I suspect the dollar will go up, interest rates will go up and our economy will downturn.

I would suggest the government pay close attention to all the promises it makes. Maybe in some weird way I actually hope it breaks a few of them.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, June 20th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I certainly reciprocate the respect of the hon. member. However, I had to chuckle when the member said that it is only 1%. That is the problem with the government: “It is only 1%; it is only $100 million; it is only $1 billion; heck, we spend $500 billion, what's a billion?” I thank the hon. member for pointing that out. That is exactly the problem with the government. It has no respect for people who end up with $13 left at the end of the month. What the hon. member wants to brag about is a tax cut that amounts to $16 a year. How ridiculous.

Take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves. A dollar in the hand of the people is worth far more than a dollar in the hands of the government.

Let me just repeat what I said. We have absolutely nothing against providing for affordable housing, but the government's way of doing it does not end up with any net difference in affordable housing. Put the money into it, let us see the concrete pour and I will vote for it. To just throw the money into a money pit, I refuse to vote for that. I work too hard for my money. My constituents work too hard for their money. The government has to learn to respect dollars. Not everybody makes as much money as that hon. member does.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, June 20th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak against Bill C-48.

I have heard a number of members in the House accuse the Conservative Party of not standing up for the homeless and for education. I want to make it absolutely clear that is completely misleading.

The issue before us today is a budget that was written on the back of a napkin in a hotel room somewhere in downtown Toronto with the perfunctory minister of finance, Mr. Buzz Hargove. It is difficult to understand who exactly is running the finances of the country when in fact billions and billions of dollars are spent just like that.

Without a plan we cannot vote for the spending of hard-earned taxpayers' dollars. The Conservative Party believes that the federal government should be the overseer and the protector of the funds that people lean on us to make decisions regarding.

The federal government should be responsible for things like international trade, the military, protecting the country's borders, but the Liberal government seems to want to interfere in every aspect of Canadian life.

The government wants to educate our children the way it feels it can do because it knows that parents cannot possibly raise their own children. The government wants to interfere with the family. It wants to tell us how to define our relationships and which relationships to have. It wants to interfere with the rights of religious freedoms.

The Prime Minister actually wants to be the premier of every province and the mayor of every city. The Conservative Party does not feel that is any way a federal government should operate.

The goal of the Conservative Party is it would like to see Canada in the highest of standards around the world. We believe that all Canadians who want a job should actually be able to get a job. We believe that Canadians should enjoy the economic growth that is the envy of the world. We have everything that we need to do exactly that, except a government with leadership.

We believe that moms and pops should go to bed every night knowing full well and feeling secure that their children will have access to a Canadian dream, any dream, a dream that I have not heard from the government in a decade, certainly not since I have been in the House representing my community of Cambridge.

We believe that children should be allowed a great secondary education, not just announcements, but action, a plan. We believe that they should have some money left to save for their retirement, not be robbed all their lives of their hard-earned dollars. Maybe, just maybe it is a dream, but just maybe they could have a little bit left over for skates or a one week summer vacation for their children. But no. What we see is a government that is so ramped on taxation that two people out of every family work, one of them just to pay the taxes for that family.

We feel very strongly that the social needs of Canadians must be met. We need to be responsible and recognize that there are Canadians who are less fortunate than we are.

However, approving the reckless spending, the unplanned and unchartered spending of $4.6 billion is not the way to do that. There is no adequate plan on a piece of paper that is not more than a page and a half long. Somehow it is about $200 million to $300 million per word.

Frankly, to be quite honest, it is not only irresponsible, it is actually very cruel to continue to make announcements without a plan or probably without any intentions of following through.

I would like to discuss what happens when the government makes spending announcements without any plan. The first thing that comes to mind is the knee-jerk reaction of let us get into spending money on a gun registry.

A plan would be what we saw with our cattle. We can register 40 million cows for $8 million, but apparently it takes almost $2 billion to register seven million long guns. We are talking long guns, because registration of hand guns has been around since 1935 and it has not done anything to resolve the shootings in downtown Toronto.

I do not know that there are duck hunters in downtown Toronto causing all that violence. I suspect that those firearms are hand guns that have been registered forever. Where are they coming from? They are coming across the border at the 200-plus border crossings without any security whatsoever. The government calls that smart borders; I call it completely inane.

What about the knee-jerk reaction at Davis Inlet? At Davis Inlet we saw children sniffing gasoline. The media reported it. It became a public outcry, which it should have been, but without a plan, what did the government do? It approved the spending of what amounted to approximately $400,000 to move those children, and what else? To move the problem. There were no solutions, just taxpayers' money. We need solutions, not announcements.

Nobody would build a house without a plan. What a disaster that would be to start digging the hole first, not even knowing what size the house would be and not even knowing how many bathrooms were needed, just a blank cheque. Canadians cannot afford that kind of lack of planning.

Probably the most known one is the sponsorship scandal. Some of my colleagues suggest that was not without a plan. There was a plan to funnel and launder taxpayers' money into the Liberal friendly coffers. Maybe that is true, but frankly, the plan was a knee-jerk reaction to get money somewhere and it ended up somewhere else.

We talk about infrastructure right now. The last time the Liberals put $6 billion into infrastructure was into something called the Canadian infrastructure works program at the beginning of the Chrétien government. Since we are going back into history, I know the questions I will get asked will be something about past spending in some government. We are not talking about history. We are talking about saving Canadians' dollars by controlling the fiscal recklessness of the government.

I hate to break it to the members opposite, but we cannot change history. Let us move forward. Let us do something different, because what they have been doing for the last decade has not been working. We have record lineups, but we have $41 billion announced for health care. Nothing has changed. Lineups have not changed.

What do we have in the Canadian infrastructure works program? We have $6 billion, and a lot of that money went toward private hockey arenas. It went toward bocce courts. Do not ask me if I have anything against bocce courts. That is just political rhetoric. Of course I do not. What I have a concern about is spending taxpayers' dollars in areas in which they were not designed to go.

The Conservative Party has nothing against the homeless, absolutely nothing. They need to be helped. They need our help. We have a problem with putting $1.6 billion into a program and not ending up with any extra beds. We have a problem with a program that has 97% administrative costs. How long does the government think that we will sit on this side of the House and give it a blank cheque to continue with its irresponsible spending habits? It stops now. Frankly, the buck stops here. We cannot vote for such reckless spending.

In my community of Cambridge, we have social programs like the Bridges and Cara's Hope. These are programs that are not funded in any way by the government, because the Liberals have too much money to blow on reckless spending.

We would like that the government get down to the business of making a plan, just as normal Canadians would have to do, and spending money on that plan. That is how we get a dollar for a dollar.

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, June 15th, 2005]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-406, An Act to change the name of the electoral district of Cambridge.

Mr. Speaker, it is with great honour that I present this private member's bill to change the name of my riding from Cambridge to Cambridge--North Dumfries, which geographically, better represents the constituents that I represent.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[Petitions, June 10th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I too am honoured to present a petition in the House from my riding of Cambridge and Kitchener, Brantford and surrounding ridings. The petitioners call upon Parliament to respect and uphold the current law, which defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.

[Petitions, June 6th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I have with me six petitions, not just from my riding of Cambridge North Dumfries but also from the surrounding ridings of Guelph and Kitchener—Waterloo. These petitioners call upon Parliament to respect and uphold the current definition of marriage which is the union of one man and one woman.