John Baird

[Committees of the House, September 21st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, first, I should point out that the actions of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition appointing me and the member for Ottawa South has seen a significant reduction in the heckling in the House. Those two should get some just reward for their actions on decorum. There is leadership.

Mr. Speaker, there have been consultations and I believe you will find there is unanimous consent of the House for the following motion:

That, notwithstanding any standing order or usual practices of the House, during the debate tonight on the Motion to concur in the Second Report of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security (recommendation not to proceed further with Bill C-391, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Firearms Act (repeal of long-gun registry)), the Chair shall not receive any quorum calls, dilatory motions, amendments or requests for unanimous consent; at the end of the time remaining for the debate, or when no member rises to speak, all questions necessary to dispose of the motion be deemed put and a recorded division be deemed requested.

[Government Spending, September 21st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, let me say this to the NDP. We recognize that the job is not done, that we must remain focused like a laser on the economy, not just to create jobs, not just to see the average incomes of Canadians rise but to address the many who still need help and we are focused very much on that.

Our focus, I say to the leader of the NDP as I did in the first supplementary, is on health care. That is the single biggest priority for spending in this government when it comes to increases. We not only have increased it by 6% a year but when the tough economic times have hit, the transfers to the provinces have gone up instead of down.

A good number of us sat in provincial legislatures when the funding was cut by the previous government. That is something this government will not do.

[Government Spending, September 21st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the rampant inflation taking place right across the nation is something that I have missed. Interest rates are at an all-time low, certainly in my lifetime.

We have come forward with a comprehensive plan. One of the centrepieces of that plan is to protect those most vulnerable.

The last time Canada faced hard economic times, the previous government cut spending by literally $25 billion to Canada's important social programs.

Thanks to the leadership of the Minister of Finance, thanks to the leadership of this government, we not only kept our faith with health care and social spending, and transfers to the provinces, we have in fact increased them. That is good leadership to support the most vulnerable.

[Government Spending, September 21st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I do have to say to my friend, the leader of the NDP, we must be very clear. The government has an important responsibility through our economic action plan to be transparent and to be accountable for the measures contained in the economic action plan.

Many of these measures Canadians had to be involved with proactively, like the home renovation tax credit, an initiative that the Minister of Finance authored. It has been literally resulting in tens of thousands of jobs in various parts of the country.

This one year, as I reported to the House earlier today, we did have to spend some $24 million on the H1N1. Thanks to the hard work of the Minister of Health, that program was a very big success.

[Government Spending, September 21st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians can trust this government, the Prime Minister, and the Minister of Finance to stand up for a strong Canada, a Canada creating jobs, hope, and opportunity. If Canadians want to know why they can trust this government, it is that this government has maintained the confidence of that party for the past two years.

[Government Spending, September 21st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, let me say this. The priorities of this government are jobs, hope, and opportunity. The priority of this government has been our economic action plan. The priority of this government is to create jobs in every corner of the country, some 12,000 infrastructure jobs, putting Canadians back to work. That is why, in the past 15 months, we have seen the creation of some 430,000 net jobs. That is the best in the OECD.

[Government Spending, September 21st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I say to my friend, the leader of the official opposition, that this government, as part of our economic action plan, has had an important responsibility to be open and to be transparent about the various programs that are part of the economic action plan. We have done that in every part of the country, and I can say directly to the leader of the Liberal Party that one of the reasons why advertising expenses rose was that we had to spend some $24 million on the H1N1 vaccine campaign, something that was not just important, but was a huge success, thanks to the hard work of the Minister of Health.

[G8 and G20 Summits, June 17th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, as part of Canada's economic action plan, we are making investments in infrastructure in every corner of the country.

I want to inform the House about the riding where we are going to be making the biggest investment in infrastructure in Canada. Does he want to know which it is? It is the member's riding. We are building a bridge to Detroit because the member for Essex has worked hard. We are going to create jobs. We are going to create opportunities, and a lot of those are going to be in the Windsor-Essex region.

[Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, June 17th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, we have had a great relationship with this New Brunswick government, with the previous New Brunswick government. We have concluded literally dozens and dozens of projects, creating a lot of jobs in every corner of New Brunswick.

We have been incredibly fair and incredibly decent. In fact, the project that the hon. member speaks of was one of the ones we considered last year, when the member for New Brunswick Southwest was the political minister, and regrettably we chose to fund other projects.

[G8 and G20 Summits, June 17th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the government has done some 12,000 infrastructure projects in every corner of the country.

We have two major goals as part of our economic action plan: one is to create badly needed jobs in the short term, and the other is to improve public infrastructure in the long term. We are accomplishing both of those objectives. We have seen since July the creation of more than 300,000 new jobs. Our plan is working.