Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to enter this rather interesting debate in the House today on the subject of Bill C-48.
It surprises me that the member for Winnipeg Centre, who was speaking a moment ago, was again attacking the Conservative Party and trying to defend the NDP record on the bill. A few moments ago in his intervention, he seemed to equate business tax cuts with spending, suggesting that somehow the NDP took money that was going to be spent anyway on business tax cuts and instead spent it on social programs, as if it is the same money.
I do not know what it is about that party that does not understand a very basic principle: tax cuts stimulate the economy. That is well understood all over the world. Let us look at a country like Ireland, which took some decisive work in that direction and made the country very competitive. Unemployment is down, the Irish economy is up and Ireland is booming worldwide.
What is it that the NDP does not understand about this? When we spend, spend, spend, and especially when we tax, tax, tax, it affects our productivity. “Productivity” is a simple word. We are in a very competitive world and Canada is falling behind.
Then we heard the Liberal member from Yukon say a moment ago that we are not debating the substance of the bill, but the whole point is that there is no substance in the bill except a very big price tag attached to something that is basically an empty promise. It is a two page bill, and with the cover pages we could add a little more to that, but there is no substance here. The substance of the bill is only two pages and there are approximately 400 words to describe spending that would amount to $4.6 billion.
Others have said before me that the procedure done with the bill is unprecedented. It is basically a blank cheque for cabinet to decide how, if and when the money will be spent. Of course in order to come across as being fiscally responsible somehow, it is labelled as contingency spending. I wonder if Canadians expect that as soon as this bill passes, if it should pass the vote that will be coming up shortly, the money is going to flow immediately.
However, of course, this is contingent upon maintaining a budget surplus of about $2 billion. That is before any of the money will be spent. I wonder if the NDP has not bought a bill of goods and is trying, along with the Liberals, to sell it to Canadians in a desperate move to prop up the government and keep it afloat. It is not likely that even a penny of that money will be spent before an ensuing election, when Canadians will be offered the same promise again, the recycled promise that if Canadians vote for the Liberals then they will get the money.
Spending without a plan is a formula for waste and mismanagement. We have seen a bit of that around here lately. In fact, that is very much an understatement. We have seen a lot of problems due to spending without a plan. For the record, since 1999 program spending has gone from $109.6 billion to $158.1 billion, for an increase of 44.3%. That is annual growth of 7.6% while the economy managed to grow in the same period by 31.6% or a compounded annual growth rate of 5.6%. Spending has been exceeding our economic growth.
What happens when we spend without a plan? The government seems to think the answer to every problem is spending. A few years ago, for example, we saw a very tragic event happen involving guns in Montreal in the massacre that took place at the university there. It was a tragedy, but suddenly the government responded by saying it would fix that by spending a pile of money, taxing the duck hunters and the farmers in the country, to somehow deal with a problem created either by criminals with illegal firearms or a man who was clearly mentally unstable.
How can we have a program budgeted to cost $2 million that ends up costing us $2 billion, with the price tag still increasing? We probably need another inquiry to try to figure out where that $2 billion went. I know that many people are concerned about how all that money can be spent on a rather useless firearms registry.
It has cost $2 billion and it is estimated that 80% of the registrations have errors, which in itself probably needs an inquiry. How could there be so many errors? For example, people in my own riding were told to send in their registrations for four firearms and they got back five licences. That is interesting: they got an extra registration. When they called the firearms centre to say that there had been a mistake, that they had an extra licence and did not own a fifth firearm, they were told to just tear it up.
My constituent said he could not do that. Let us just imagine that. We tear it up, the registry says it has an extra firearm and someday a police office will be at the door looking for that firearm; if we cannot produce it, we are in big trouble.
I cannot tell members how many people have come to me about the errors in this program. That itself probably could be the subject of an inquiry.
As intelligent people we should be able to come up with programs that actually address what they are purporting to accomplish. On this side of the House we are concerned about spending without a plan or spending that creates an illusion of action when it is actually misdirected.
We saw another example of this prior to the election in 2000 with the HRDC boondoggle. Money was spent without any accountability mechanisms being put in place. It was very wasteful spending that went into programs in the hands of government friends, Liberal friends or patronage friends. They got money for programs to produce something, programs that in essence did not accomplish what they purported to. Those people declared bankruptcy a few years later and came back to the purse with another proposed idea to get more money. There was no accountability and there were no objectives and no measurements of whether they were actually accomplishing what they headed out to do.
A short time ago we had a very big concern about a problem in Davis Inlet with the Inuit situation there. It was a tragic situation for many young people because they had very little vision for life and were involved in substance abuse. It was a tragedy. The government had the bright idea to move the settlement a few miles away at a cost of some $400,000 a person. We might wonder how it could possibly cost that much. We know that housing costs are high in remote areas and building and construction costs are high, but how could it possibly cost $400,000 per person to relocate this small number of people in a program that has apparently not solved the problem?
Then, of course, just a short time ago we saw the government's approach to the threat to federalism and the very close vote we had on the Quebec sovereignty issue. The government decided to solve that with money. The government decided to spend $250 million to solve the problem. We all know through the Gomery inquiry what a tragedy that turned out to be, with nearly $100 million misdirected and a lot of the money going back not only into the hands of Liberal friendly firms but into the hands of big donors to the party, with money itself going back into the Liberal Party coffers to run an election. Thus, spending without a plan creates problems.
We have had record surpluses and that is a very good thing in the country. It is a good thing when a government runs a surplus, but we also have a very large debt. We are still carrying about $510 billion of accumulated debt. It costs the country about $29 billion a year to service that debt.
At a time when the government has surpluses, that is a time when prudent financial management would say we have to pay down the debt so that we are not continuing to pay those very high costs into the future. Those costs are a mortgage on our own future and on our children's future.
We do not know if our economic prosperity is going to continue at the same unprecedented levels that we have had in these last few years. In fact, the evidence is that we are falling behind. If we do not increase our productivity, our economic future is going to be threatened. That is clear.
I have with me a recent article from the June 13 edition of The Economist , a very prestigious magazine. The economic elite likes to read The Economist . Some members of Parliament might occasionally read it. Perhaps there are some regular readers in the House, particularly those who are economists, such as the Leader of the Opposition. This magazine has a global readership. The article is about the indecisiveness of Mr. Dithers last winter. As well, in last week's edition, our Prime Minister was derided as Canada's drunken sailor thanks to his recent spending spree.
I am concerned for Canada's international reputation. This is a magazine that only 18 months ago in a cover story called Canada “cool” for the way we were managing our economy. On the edge of an election, suddenly things have become uncool. This magazine, read by leaders and politicians around the world, takes a jaundiced look at the Prime Minister's administration, which has devoted billions of unbudgeted dollars to staying alive as a besieged minority Liberal government.
We also have the Canadian chambers of commerce talking about this deal, saying that:
--the Liberal government's spending promises made in anticipation of a spring election, coupled with a $4.6 billion NDP budget deal, leave it with little or no financial room to focus on productivity enhancing initiatives.
Canada is now 18th out of 24 industrialized countries in terms of average productivity and growth.
There are many priorities that need to be addressed in the budget, but creating an illusion by offering to spend money that likely will not be spent before an election is not sound fiscal management.
