Helena Guergis

[Supply, February 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, what the member opposite is neglecting to understand here, and what I hearing in the House, is typical arrogance. The Liberals want to keep running business as usual. They are comfortable that the foundations are being run, and it is a secret to Canadians as to what is goes on in them.

The Liberals are ignoring the many calls from the Auditor General and Canadians to be accountable for the tax dollars. My constituents in Simcoe--Grey want to know what is going on with the $7.7 billion sitting in the bank.

The Liberals will not support the motion because they feel they do not have to answer to taxpayers. They continually talk the talk on accountability, but have failed to deliver.

[Supply, February 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, what the Prime Minister and the Liberals have done is use an accounting trick to mislead Canadians. They have told us that our surplus is much lower than it actually is because the excess money sitting in these foundations is, according to them, money already spent. However, the $7.7 billion surplus has been sitting in an unaccountable foundation out of sight and out of grasp of the Auditor General and outside the scope of the Access to Information Act.

While the Liberals have been throwing billions of dollars at unaccountable foundations, they continue to delay tax relief on hard-working Canadians, hard-working Canadians like the local farmers of my riding of Simcoe--Grey who continue to battle with the Canadian agriculture income stabilization program, the CAIS program, a program that has been universally rejected by producers across the country as a policy that unfairly hurts farmers.

Farmers in Simcoe--Grey have told me that the CAIS program is not working and it is not meeting their needs. In fact, the Liberal government has made the CAIS program so difficult that farmers must pay significant fees to farm accounts just to apply for the program.

It astounds me that government can so easily throw billions at unaccountable foundations to do whatever they please. However, it develops complicated funding programs for hard-working Canadians in desperate need.

The farming community is just one example. Municipalities across Canada have been looking for financial assistance to meet their infrastructure needs and have been left out in the cold.

Our seniors who have worked so hard for our country have been neglected by the government. Seniors should not have to worry about how they will pay for their medication. They should not have to take jobs long into retirement because the money they receive from government puts them below the poverty line. What really bothers me is, according to the Retirement Planning Institute, a significant number of Canadians do not receive proper Canada pension benefits. The government should be focusing on assisting our seniors. They should be respected and given the dignity they have earned.

The government needs to get its priorities straight. It needs to take immediate action to provide funding in areas that have been neglected, and it needs to be accountable for its funding decisions.

The Conservative Party of Canada agrees with the Auditor General when she said:

--decisions on funding and accountability should be based on the need for sound management of public funds; they should not be based on the goal of achieving a desired accounting result.

In other words, spend money where money is needed and account for it only when it is spent.

The Auditor General looked at three areas of accountability with respect to the foundations. She looked at reporting to Parliament, ministerial oversight and provision for external audit and evaluation. Her conclusion was that overall progress had been unsatisfactory.

This is the fourth time that the Auditor General has raised the issue of foundations with the government; first in 1997, then in November 1999, then in April 2002. The Liberals keep ignoring the warnings just like they did with the sponsorship program.

The bottom line is that the foundations are failing the most basic fundamentals of accountability. They are not answerable to Parliament through a minister, the Auditor General does not have access to them and Canadians have no idea if they get value for their $9 billion in hard-earned tax dollars.

The Auditor General also has indicated that the Treasury Board transfer policy, which came into effect in June 2000, requires departments to report to Parliament on transfer payments exceeding $5 million. They must include information such as objectives and expected results in reports on plans and priorities and evidence of related results achieved in departmental performance reports. However, the information tabled by the departments focused mainly on the foundations' expenditures and activities or on broad objectives that in many cases were not measurable. The outcomes or benefits for Canadians' hard-earned $9 billion was not adequately reported.

To date Liberals continue to deny the Auditor General access to foundations for no good reason. They claim foundations are doing good work for Canadians. If that is the case, why not open the books? What do they have to hide?

Canadians deserve results for their hard-earned tax dollars. The Auditor General's report on foundations has demonstrated that the Liberals continue to throw money around with little ministerial oversight, non-existent parliamentary oversight and with no accountability for their actions.

Once again, we see that the Liberal government and the Prime Minister have proved their lack of commitment toward running an open and transparent government.

I support today's motion, which reads as follows:

That the House call on the government to implement the measures recommended in the latest Auditor General's report to improve the framework for the accountability of foundations, in particular, to ensure that foundations are subject to performance audits that are reported to Parliament and that the Auditor General be appointed as the external auditor of foundations.

Canadians deserve accountability from the government, and they are sure not getting it from the Prime Minister and the Liberal government.

[Supply, February 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, accountability can be defined as responsibility to account for and/or explain actions undertaken. Public accountability is where it is incumbent upon a government body, an agency, board or commission, to account to the electorate, or the wider public, for a decision, for example, on policy or involving the expenditure of public funds. This is a definition we all know and understand. It is a principle that should be the basis of good government.

However we are again talking about how the current Liberal government has once again failed to be accountable to the citizens of Canada.

In 1997 the then finance minister created foundations, non-profit corporations, considered to be at arm's length from the government. He has since put more than $9 billion into foundations and yet $7.7 billion sits in the bank. What mystifies me is that the government has recorded these payments as expenses, even though the foundations do not expect to use the money for a number of years.

The majority of Canadians cannot afford to have their government hoard their money away for years, unspent, while continuing to be overtaxed. What Paul Martin and the Liberals have done is used an accounting tool--

[Supply, February 15th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, what is very important about the Conservative Party's position on child care is that we recognize not everyone wants to put their child into institutionalized day care. They want the opportunity to choose. The government is putting $5 billion tax dollars just to start a program that not everyone will have the opportunity to access. There is no way we can possibly build a system to which everyone would have equal access.

We believe in providing choice. The best way to do that is to lower taxes, put more money in the pockets of Canadians so they can make a choice as to where they want to spend their dollars and how they want to raise their children.

[Supply, February 15th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I think I have been very clear in answering the questions from the hon. member in everything I have stated today. We are talking about the importance of reducing taxes for low and modest income families, not taking $5 billion of their tax dollars and telling them that we have to institutionalize their babies.

We heard the minister say earlier today that parents and hard-working mothers and fathers cannot manage to take care of their kids. He said that the care they were getting now was mediocre. I find that appalling. There are 308 members in the House of Commons. I would like to think the majority of them were raised by their parents at home and that their parents had the choice on how they would raise them. We all turned out pretty darned good. I do not agree with the Liberal government in institutionalizing children.

Look at our seniors now. We institutionalize them. We put them into an old age home and we let them sit there. The Conservative Party has proposed a caregiver tax credit of $7,000 for non-professional caregivers. We believe that seniors deserve the dignity of staying in their own homes. We also believe that children have the right to have the dignity to be raised in their own homes as well, unlike this Liberal government.

[Supply, February 15th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I rise with pleasure today to speak on the Conservative Party's motion on child care funding.

I believe it is very important that assistance should be provided to parents and that they should be able to choose the type of child care they want for their children. After all, parents know what is best for their children.

The Liberal one size fits all child care program has been criticized lately by the provinces. The criticism echoes what the Conservative Party has been saying all along; that the program fails to provide parents with the choices they need to address the specific and varying needs of their children.

This is why the Conservative Party will continue to support all existing child benefit programs, such as the national child benefit, the early childhood development initiative, the multilateral framework on early learning and child care and other federal government support of early learning and child care in Canada. Of course the Conservative Party would introduce a broad based tax relief that would directly benefit parents and would allow them to make their own choices about the care and nurturing of their children.

We believe parents deserve options. They want their children to be raised and educated in a way that reflects their family values, cultures and traditions. A Liberal institutional day care system will not allow parents to have such a dramatic impact on the care and nurturing of their children. It will not reflect their family values, cultures or traditions. This is very sad.

Let us not mention the fact that total child care expenditures have risen by over 20% in the last 20 years. Demand for child care services has risen and fees for full time day care are on the rise. The cost of living has also risen dramatically, causing the rate of employment for mothers with preschool age children to rise from 17% in 1967 to 65% in 1997. Eighty-three per cent of married couples with children both work, and the percentage of single mothers working has soared to 82%. That trend is continuing.

That is why choice is so important. Parents should not be forced to put their children in an institution that the government wants. They should be free to raise and educate them in a manner that they feel is in the best interests of their children.

Early childhood education is so important because this period sets the stage for long term emotional, behavioural and intellectual well-being. That is why we need to have the necessary childhood programs to prepare children to succeed in school, to improve the well-being of all of our children and facilitate the participation of parents in the labour force and continuing education.

However, the Liberal program is just not up to the job. That is why Alberta and Quebec are considering opting out. New Brunswick has requested autonomy for its system. The current systems in Ontario and Manitoba are more advanced than the Liberal program.

The minister came out of the meeting with his provincial counterparts on Friday, and believe it or not, there was no agreement on a national child care system. Why? Because the federal government refused to provide any financial commitment beyond the five years. The provinces have seen this song and dance before and they know how it ends. The federal government launches a massive new social program and when the bill comes in, it is nowhere to be found, except maybe in this case, on the hockey rink.

Provinces are struggling now to provide good quality education, elementary education with text books that are in good repair. The Liberal government wants to launch into a whole new institutionalized day care. We cannot afford our elementary system.

A Conservative government would cater to the needs of parents and their children with a plan that would last and a plan that the provinces could and would support.

The Liberal government has been promising Canadians a national child care program for over 10 years. However, it is clear that once again it is not up to the job. In fact, we heard the minister talk about and describe day care over the past decade as stagnant, fragmented and unregulated. Let us give the Liberal government a round of applause on this one. It is this way because this Liberal government has failed to deliver on its promises for the last decade.

I fully support our motion. I call upon the government to address the issue of child care by fulfilling its commitment to reduce taxes for low and modest income families in the upcoming budget and, so as to respect provincial jurisdiction, ensure that additional funds for child care are provided directly to parents.

[Child Care, February 15th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, working moms would prefer to help raise their own kids. However, the minister says that at home parental care is mediocre. He said that kids raised in their own homes do not have a rich experience. How dare the minister say that parents raising their own children constitutes mediocre care? Will this minister apologize to working women for his demeaning comments?

[Child Care, February 15th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the social development minister has said that parents wishing to raise their own children at home are “out of date”, that children should be put into institutionalized care instead. Will the minister admit that he is the one who is out of date and understand that women deserve and want choice?

[Sponsorship Program, February 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the Gomery inquiry is not a badge of honour for the Liberal Party to wear. The government only set it up because it got caught. Despite whatever the Prime Minister or his cronies say, the Auditor General has told us that there are millions of tax dollars missing and Canadians deserve this money back.

When will the Prime Minister order the money his operatives funnelled to run his campaigns be paid back to Canadians?

[Sponsorship Program, February 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it seems very evident that the sponsorship program was nothing more than a cash cow for Liberal supporters. Mr. Jacques Corriveau complained that he did not receive payment for his work on the 1997 election. In response he received millions of hard earned Canadian tax dollars in contracts from the sponsorship program.

When will the Prime Minister instruct the Liberal Party to pay back taxpayers' money?