Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to take part in this important debate, perhaps the last budget debate until the election.
This budget, I dare say, can be described as being long on promises and short on delivery. There is an alarming shortfall when one starts to examine the actual impact that this will have on the day to day lives of average Canadians in their backyards and in their back pockets. There is very little the government has to crow about in this recent document.
It was a safe budget. It was something the Liberals obviously redrafted in light of the current atmosphere of scandal, mismanagement and misappropriation of funds that has been going on in the public works department and, frighteningly, perhaps in other departments as well. It is an issue clearly of mismanagement that the government is trying to sweep away with this budget and portraying itself as somehow being prudent and fiscally responsible.
The fact remains that the government has had 10 years to get it right. We know things are starting to slip and Liberals are getting desperate when they start to bring out the name of a previous prime minister, the former Conservative prime minister, and try to lay blame at his feet somehow, castigate programs that they try to attribute somewhere else, knowing full well that after 10 years in government any suggestion that this was somebody else's fault is a huge dodge, a huge distraction. The truth is that the Prime Minister and his predecessor are two sides of the same coin.
It is the hundreds of millions of coins that went missing that should alarm Canadians the most. The Prime Minister and his predecessor are inextricably linked. Our current Prime Minister was the finance minister during the overwhelming majority of the tenure of the Liberal government.
When the right hon. member was overhead musing recently about the previous administration, what kind of prime minister could actually expect Canadians to take that type of characterization seriously? He was part of that previous administration, clearly.
I remind the current Minister of Finance, who also held posts in that government, similarly has to be held to account. The intent to somehow distance themselves and slide away from their own record is not working and not sitting well with Canadians.
We see in this budget a lot of rhetoric, a lot of misdirection, a lot of attempt to somehow distance themselves and put a wedge between them and their own record but that will not work.
I want to get back to the issue of the budget itself. There is a great deal of disappointment that is now resounding across the land. I spoke to a woman indirectly through my office today who pointed out the obvious. Wanda MacLean said that some of these promises, which were supposed to impact in such a profound way on education, health care, military spending and other areas, really is a pittance. In the case of Ms. MacLean, who has a 10 year old son Jonathan who suffers from autism, this special needs child will receive no significant or substantive help from this budget.
I say that knowing full well that the government, with great ceremony and great aplomb over its special needs program, has come up far short of what people like Wanda MacLean were hoping for. In fact, she tells me that she will receive an additional $9.96 per month as a result of these budgetary allotments, barely enough for a happy meal.
Ms. MacLean and others are not happy that the government specifically earmarked this issue as something it would address and yet when we look at the numbers we see less than $10 in the pot for a mother with a special needs child. Sadly, part of the government's record is promising big but delivering little. There are many other areas to touch upon.
Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Yellowhead.
The current Liberal government has laid out very little in terms of its vision of where it wants to take the country. There appears to be no comprehensive plan. That is another overwhelming conclusion one draws when looking at this budget.
Regarding post-secondary education, we had students in the gallery yesterday, and this week in Ottawa there are many students here from the Forum for Young Canadians who are participating in that terrific program.
Again the government had a golden opportunity to buttress and support students who are struggling with massive student debt loads in this country. Many of them have the equivalent of a mortgage when they graduate, but no home, no car and often no job. The expectation is that they will start to pay back that money almost immediately. Many of them, because of lack of opportunity, will leave the country in order to be able to try to keep those financial commitments.
There was a chance to put clearly in place incentives for young Canadians, those who have gone back to school and those who are upgrading, to stay and work and afford an education. It is the spiralling costs of education tuition that are a direct result of the clawbacks and the cutbacks from social transfer payments for which the government has been responsible now for a decade.
Again, it is directly laid at the feet of the current Prime Minister, who as minister of finance balanced the books, supposedly, on the backs of students, on the back of our health care system, which has been totally undermined, and on the backs of the provinces, by downloading these expenses. As well, we have also seen other disingenuous slight of hand attempts to take money from the EI fund and put it into general revenue, and to take money away from our military, clearly, leaving them so stretched, underfunded and under-equipped.
This ruse that has been perpetrated by the current Prime Minister is something that is going to receive great scrutiny and further examination as we head into an election. According to the government's own numbers from its consultant firm KPMG, this strategy that has been put forward, again in a very deceitful way, attempts to justify some of the program spending that continues. According to the government's own numbers, the firm has set out that $150 million was spent on the gun registry this year. If we factor in how much it costs for a student to pay tuition for half a term at university, around $5,000 in most cases, we see that this money being wasted on the gun registry could have paid to educate or could have paid the first year tuition of 30,000 students in this country.
Again it is a clear question of priorities: a useless gun registry that does not work, that does not protect Canadians--the Hell's Angels will not register their guns--or money put into student education, which again was supposed to be highlighted in this budget.
The budget leaves a lot of questions unanswered for Canadians. The Conservative Party would certainly believe in greater accessibility to education. We believe in eliminating barriers to post-secondary education, for example, doing away with taxable status on scholarships. Provincial jurisdiction of course factors very much into what we can do in health and education, but I would suggest that if we had given an ability to pay down as much as 10% on student loans annually as a percentage of income tax, there would actually be an incentive to stay and work in this country and get credit for that towards a student loan.
Some of the programs like the millennium scholarship fund have been an abysmal failure. The promise was to assist 12,000 graduates, but we know now, upon calculating it, that only 2,000 received this assistance. There were many broken promises with respect to interest relief in the past for student loan holders.
This is a question, like many others, that will be examined in the run-up to this election. Who would do it better, more responsibly, in a costed way? The answer in my view is the Conservative Party. Under the new leadership, under the new direction, this Conservative Party is going to be offering Canadians a clear alternative in the next campaign.
The budget also announced the CHST supplement, which was promised in the previous budget, a $2 billion announcement. We are glad to see it coming. It is little, it is late, but still, there it is. It has been announced five times. That is not new. What the premiers and my own Premier John Hamm of Nova Scotia were looking for was a long term commitment to health care, to changing the equalization program.
