Madam Speaker, I am glad to have this opportunity to speak tonight and address the House on Bill C-48, the NDP budget. Certainly, that is exactly what it is.
Canadian people have never elected an NDP government and maybe there is a reason for that. In Ontario they did it once and people across the entire province of Ontario say they will never do it again. Why? Uncontrolled spending is a recipe for disaster. In fact, it brought Ontario to its knees. The Bob Rae government proved to Ontarians that the NDP way of taxing and spending was not the way to go. People are worried at this point that the same thing is happening at the federal level now.
Every weekend that I go back to my riding of Simcoe--Grey I hear this from someone. Last year during the federal election the Canadian people did not vote for an NDP government. There was no mandate given for dramatic spending increases. In fact, the irony today is the Liberals said that our spending commitments were not doable. Now they blew our spending projections out of the water. I am not surprised. Liberals have never seen a problem of which they did not think they could not spend their way out.
Who does not want more money for health care, education and the environment? In fact, these are Conservative priorities. Who does not want a better car, nicer clothes or a bigger house? It is fine to want those things, but who will pay for them? If one is from the left side of the spectrum, they will probably say “the government”, as if the government were some lifeless entity, a big public piggy bank that could be dipped into at will.
The government is not supposed to be like this. At least politicians are supposed to act with integrity and should try to govern with integrity. A government should represent its people and not the friends of the Liberal Party. A government has no money of its own, only the people do. All that it has to spend is our money.
Conservatives believe that if we want a higher standard of living, where there is better health care, a better house, whether we want our children to go to a better school or buy them better clothes, we should be trying to create more wealth, a more prosperous society, so we can afford the things we want in life. History shows us that every time the NDP props up a Liberal government, spending goes through the roof. The long term effects are eventually the economy will slow down and the interest rates will start to rise. It happened 20-plus years ago and now we see history repeating itself.
Here is a bit of background. The facts are absolutely astounding. Did the members know that Canadians have seen their real take home pay only increase by 3.6% over the past 15 years? For the average guy on the street who is earning $35,000 a year, that works out to be $1.60 a week. I do not know what I would do with all that cash.
However, it is important to point out that since 1996 and 1997, government revenues have soared by 40%. Therefore, we wonder why Canadians have been falling behind over the past 12 years. We wonder why take home pay does not seem to go as far as it used to. That is because higher spending is always followed by higher taxes. Why? Because spending without a plan is a recipe for disaster and that is what this budget proposes. There are a whole bunch of promises of new spending but it is awfully short on specifics.
Maybe I was a little unfair to the NDP a few moments ago. There are quite a few examples where the Liberals have cooked up a new spending program without a proper plan. How about the gun registry? They promised it would cost a few million and now it is close to $2 billion. How about the HRDC boondoggle? There is another billion and still counting. The bureaucracy has no idea where that money has gone. Of course, there is the sponsorship scandal. Who knows how many millions that will be in the big black hole. Although again, maybe I have been a little unfair. As the testimony at the Gomery inquiry has clearly shown, the Liberals certainly had a plan for the sponsorship cash, and it was not Canadian priorities.
Who would have thought the former finance minister's own staff members would be on the receiving end of a cash under the table economy? However, as the whole world knows now, that is how the Liberals do business. They have been in power for so long that they have grown accustomed to spending taxpayer money without a second thought. It is like they have this sense of entitlement to the pocketbooks of ordinary Canadians.
How else can they explain the $4.6 billion difference between Bill C-43 and Bill C-48?
After the finance minister introduced his budget and the NDP started making demands for more money, what did he say? He said:
You can’t go on stripping away piece by piece by piece of the budget…. You can’t, after the fact, begin to cherry pick: ‘We’ll throw that out and we’ll put that in, we’ll stir this around and mix it all up again.’ That’s not the way you maintain a coherent fiscal framework. If you engage in that exercise, it is an absolute, sure formula for the creation of a deficit.
Do the members across the way remember all this?
What did the Prime Minister do a few weeks later when it looked like his government was going to fall? He started to cherry-pick and he picked pounds of cherries. He was willing to do anything to cling to power: toss out some corporate tax cuts, jack up spending by about $5 billion, and voila, they had a new budget.
What does it say for the democratic process of our country when a finance minister goes through months of budget consultations with various stakeholders, speaking with experts, speaking to those who defend our social programs, deciding on what is best for the country, all of the stakeholders, and then his boss gets together with the leader of the NDP and after an hour in a hotel room somewhere in Toronto, he has a completely different budget and he expects us to support it?
All anyone needs to write a budget in Canada is a hotel room, a couple of napkins and a calculator. If that is all it takes, I think just about anybody can do a budget. In fact I know I would like a new pair of shoes, anybody else? What does that say about our country and about the state of affairs here in Canada?
The truth is that most Canadians do have to write a budget and, most important , they have to stick to it because if they do not they are on their own. They cannot raise taxes or increase their income by snapping their fingers, and they cannot borrow unlimited sums of money. However governments can and that is what the government will be doing shortly if it follows through on Bill C-48.
Let us remember what the finance minister said last April:
If you engage in that exercise, it is an absolute, sure formula for the creation of a deficit.
What makes this budget even worse is that there is no plan for spending all these billions. The Auditor General has raised some serious concerns about the ability of certain departments to deliver programs effectively, and it just so happens that the departments with which the Auditor General is concerned are the same departments the Liberals and the NDP want to give more money to in this bill. I have been raising this issue where the Department of International Cooperation is concerned.
The leader of the NDP stands and says that he has delivered more money for, fill in the blank, the environment, education, health care, which again, I remind members, are all Conservative priorities. However the leader of the NDP seems to be making promises with this money and is providing details but I am not exactly sure where he is getting these details from because they are nowhere to be found in the budget bill.
He says all of this, though, all the while knowing that none of it is true. He knows that there is not a specific plan for spending any of this money and he knows that the fine print says that the Liberals will only do it if there is a big enough surplus, and, goodness knows, we have no idea what the finances actually look like in this country.
He also knows that the Liberals play the shell game when it comes to projecting our surpluses. They could stash more billions in those foundations they set up, the same foundations that are not accountable to Parliament or the Auditor General ,and we might never know anything about. I think there is $9 billion in these foundations so far. That is no way to run a country.
People live happier and more productive lives if they are able to fulfill their own destinies and their own targets. One of the biggest problems with Liberals is that they think they know how to spend my money and our money better than we do. The Liberals keep telling Canadians what their priorities are. They keep telling Canadians what they want instead of actually listening to what Canadian are telling them that they need.
We should allow Canadians to keep more of their hard-earned money. The goal of our party is that Canadians have the highest standard of living in the world.
If you want to find a job there should be lots of them and good paying ones. Our goal is that every region of Canada will be prosperous and self-sufficient. Conservatives want Canada to be the economic envy of the world. Every parent--
