Pierre Poilievre

[Questions on the Order Paper, February 15th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I want to discuss with the hon. member the very offensive remarks that were made by the minister earlier today when he compared the sacrifice of a parent who decides to stay at home with his or her children to the luxury of tasting ice cream.

For the 47% of parents who do make that choice and for the 90% of parents who wish they could make that choice, according to the Vanier Institute study, it is not a luxury like ice cream. It is an important decision that they are making to pass on to the next generation, a life, the care, the love of a family. It is not merely the frivolity of this luxury of ice cream.

I want the hon. member to comment on the fact that the Liberal program is not universal. It excludes 85% to 90% of children: those who have a parent who stays home, those who are cared for by a family member, those who are in community based care, or at synagogues, mosques and churches that offer care, and those who are in private care facilities. All of those children are excluded under this Liberal babysitting bureaucracy.

I wonder if the hon. member would comment on the overall mentality that permeates the entire Liberal proposal and is most exemplified by the minister's ice cream remarks earlier today. I wonder if the hon. member would comment on those offensive remarks.

[Questions on the Order Paper, February 15th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the very offensive remarks were made by the minister when he compared the decision of parents to keep one parent in the home with the children to the luxury of having ice cream.

The Vanier Institute said that 90% of parents would make that choice if they could; they believe it to be the ideal choice. In fact it is a larger number of women who prefer this choice than men. I think it is deeply offensive, and I wonder if the hon. member agrees, that the minister would compare that choice, which by the way 47% of parents make, to the luxury of having ice cream or losing a few centimetres off of one's waistline.

Not only were his remarks offensive, they were actually untrue. It is not a luxury that cannot be afforded and cannot occur. Forty per cent of parents do it and the other 53% who might like to do it cannot because the government structures a tax system that makes it unaffordable to do so.

Instead of trying to enable parents to make the choice they want to make, the government is putting in a new program that forces them into the choice that they do not want to make. Would the hon. member stand in the House and address the ill-founded logic and the offensive nature of the minister's remarks?

[Questions on the Order Paper, February 15th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am somewhat surprised that the hon. member, before getting into the substance of his remarks, did not address the very offensive remarks made by the minister earlier today when he compared the decision of parents to keep one parent in the home to the luxury of having ice cream.

[Sponsorship Program, February 14th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, this is the third such delay. The Treasury Board President was supposed to have these guidelines before the government operations committee a long time ago. Originally, the guidelines were meant to be completed by September 30. Then it was promised for Christmas. Now the dog has eaten the minister's homework for a third time.

What is taking the king of procrastination so long? Is he worried that these new rules might get in the way of the Liberal patronage bonanza?

[Tsunami Relief, February 14th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, early this month I had occasion to meet with about 55 Tamil Canadians in my home community of Barrhaven and committed to take their concerns to the highest democratic chamber in the land: this House. They told me they support traditional marriage, they want the government to give child care dollars directly to all parents, including stay at home dads and moms, and they demanded fiscal accountability.

That is why today I rise to alert the House to growing accusations that millions of tsunami relief dollars have been misspent in Sri Lanka. The country's top aid distributor said government corruption has blocked aid from almost 70% of victims. Three officials have already been fired for mishandling money.

Canada should demand accountability. With nearly a million Sinhalese and Tamil victims, it is not enough to sign a cheque and walk away. I am proud to stand with Barrhaven's Tamil community in demanding accountability and justice for all tsunami victims.

[Question No. 57, February 2nd, 2005]

With regard to the potential move of National Defence Headquarters: ( a ) has the government completed a business plan for the purchase or lease of the JDS Uniphase campus in South Nepean; ( b ) if so, for which departments; and ( c ) what are the specifics of this plan?

[Transportation Safety Board, February 1st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, Jim Walsh lost his cabinet post in Newfoundland after taking a paper bag of $4,500 from a company seeking a $2 million government contract. Now he has shattered ethics codes on partisanship when he attended a Liberal fundraising bash.

What is Walsh's punishment? He gets to keep his six-figure salary on the Transportation Safety Board. Why is the Prime Minister continuing to protect him? Is it because of who he knows in the PMO?

[Finance, February 1st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the member is absolutely correct in pointing out that the majority of parents who actually use the Quebec system are in the upper income level. Oftentimes it is upper income professionals with two incomes per family who use the day care system. We are taking money from working class families in Quebec. We are taking dollars out of the pockets of the assembly line workers to subsidize the CEO's child-raising at the government level. That is essentially what we are seeing.

I want to go back to the very simple principle here. This is about choice. When a government imposes a babysitting bureaucracy and forces everyone to pay for it, regardless of whether they use it, it is taking away a choice from the family. That is why I propose that we take the dollars the government is setting aside for this babysitting bureaucracy and give it directly to parents, allowing them to choose.

There is one more thing. If the government really believed in equal rights, as it claims to with this discussion over marriage, why does it continually discriminate against those families who make the choice to keep one parent in the home? Why are they in a higher tax bracket? A $60,000 a year family with two incomes pays a much lower tax rate than a family with one income. That is discrimination. It violates the very pretense of equality that the government is pinning its hopes on same sex marriage upon, and that is just plain wrong.

[Finance, February 1st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to discuss this dinosaur analogy. This comes from a party that would force middle class families, whether they support the program or not, to pay higher taxes and face new strains on their own financial capacity to pay for a new government bureaucracy.

She would take away a woman's right to choose how to raise her own children by forcing her to pay higher taxes into a government run bureaucracy. I propose to give the family the right to choose. Perhaps there are some families that want to use day care alternatives. I do not have any problem with that. That is why the government should give the dollars directly to those parents and let them decide how to spend them properly.

Instead, the member across the way would coercively take those dollars in the form of taxation and force an option on that family. She calls us dinosaurs. That is one of the most retrograde ideas I have heard since arriving on the Hill.

[Finance, February 1st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I confess I am new here and I do not know all the rules, but I always thought it was against the rules to bring pets into the House of Commons. I have just noted that in fact there is a big elephant in the room, an enormous elephant that we are not focusing in this debate. It is quintessential to the discussions surrounding the budget, this elephant is, yet no one seems to be discussing it.

Of course I refer to the Liberal plan to institute a national government-run babysitting bureaucracy, or what the Liberals call a national day care program. We might be hearing something about this elephant in the upcoming budget, but we are not yet sure. I would like to discuss this enormous elephant in my address to the House today with regard to the budget that we expect to see here at the end of February or in early March.

Let us start with the principles that the Liberal government says this elephant will be guided by. The first principle, of course, is one of the Liberals' catchphrases. They love using this word even though they are not quite sure what it means. They call it universality. They plan to put into place a government babysitting bureaucracy or an elephant that can universally carry every child on its back; that is what they are promising, anyway.

The Liberals have been promising this for the last 10 years. In 1993 they promised this elephant. In 1997 they promised this elephant. And in 2000 they promised it. Now they are promising it one more time.

It is not that I worry they will not keep their promise. I am actually worried that they will on this particular subject, because this elephant will be anything but universal. The social development minister has told us that the national day care program he proposes will only go to government sponsored day care facilities, which means by definition that this national daycare system will not be universal.

It will exclude parents who make the decision to raise their children in the home. It will exclude neighbourhood nannies or others in the community who give community based care to children. It will exclude synagogues, mosques, temples and churches in communities that provide child care throughout the day. It will exclude qualified professionals who operate private facilities where children are cared for throughout the day.

I do not have my dictionary with me, but as far as I know, if some program excludes 80% to 90% of potential recipients then it cannot be, by definition, universal. This is a universal program that excludes 85% or 90% of children. That is the first point. That is my first problem with this elephant.

Second, the Liberals say they intend to provide this program for 2,500 children. We know there are more than 2,500 within the specified age group, so once again, it will not be universal.

We should keep in mind that even those parents who do choose alternative methods of raising their children, who choose not to use the government babysitting bureaucracy, will still have to pay for it. That would be like forcing people to pay at my restaurant even though they do not like what is on the menu and even though they have not dropped by to patronize the facility.

So it is not universal and it will still make others who do not use it pick up the tab.

Let us discuss the cost of this elephant, because I can assure the House that it is going to be very expensive to feed this beast. The Liberal government says $5 billion over five years.

Can we have some common sense here for a moment? Do hon. members really believe that $1 billion a year, spread across this entire country, the second biggest nation on earth, is going to adequately finance a universal day care program? The Liberals are going to spread $1 billion across 10 provinces and 3 territories.

I suspect that in my province of Ontario we would get something in the neighbourhood of $300 million a year. Is it really realistic that the Liberals are going to bring in a universal day care program in the province of Ontario for $300 million? Of course not.

Then they are going to unionize all of the professionals who will work in these facilities and be faced with labour turmoil and potential strikes like the kinds we see in other sectors. And they expect us to believe they are going to be able to do all of that for $1 billion a year nationwide?

Excuse me, but I am a little bit skeptical of this elephant we have in the room today. Ultimately it is going to cost a lot more. We know what the Liberals said about the gun registry. They said it would pay for itself. It is costing us $2 billion.

We know about the massive overexpenditures that have happened in other departments. We are sure to see similar overexpenditures in this new bureaucracy, which will ultimately mean higher taxes for middle class families and parents with children. It will mean that parents who have the responsibility to care for kids are going to be paying more to the government in higher taxes, which means there will be greater stress on the family unit. It will continue to be more difficult for parents to raise their own children, thus defeating the purpose of having this elephant in the room in the first place.

Then the Liberals talk about quality. I wonder who believes that this government can be trusted with raising our children. Let us look at the way in which it manages other programs.

Consider the Canada pension plan. I am a young person. If I could invest the premiums I am forced to pay into CPP myself, I can assure members that I would be receiving a much higher rate of return than the 2% or 3% maximum, optimistically, the government managed program could ever pay.

Consider our military, with submarines that will not go down and helicopters that will not go up. This is a government that has horribly mismanaged our national defence. As recently as the catastrophe in south Asia, we were unable to transport our troops because we do not have heavy airlift capacity. It is another example of blatant government mismanagement.

Consider Technology Partnerships Canada, where the government recovers only 5% or 6% of all of the loans it gives out. And it considers this program a success. A recovery rate of 5% would bankrupt any of the major banks in the country, but somehow this government considers that to be a marvellous success. I guess it is the same kind of logic that would lead them to believe that a child care program which only serves 5% or 6% of the nation's kids is universal. But we will return to that in a moment.

I would be remiss if I did not propose an alternative. I believe in parents. I believe in the truism that civilization is passed on from parent to child and that our civilization exists today because parents have carried out that duty and responsibility. That is what we on this side of the House of Commons believe. We would take those same child care dollars that this government would give to a babysitting bureaucracy and we would give it to parents directly. That is because we trust families. We trust parents. We believe that no one loves a child more than its own parents.

In conclusion, I would like to announce that the colour of this elephant, of course, is white, and the only value-added it brings to this debate is that potentially it will carry on its back the Minister of Social Development and the Prime Minister to legacy land. Other than that it does not serve our nation's children and it goes clearly against the norms that have built our civilization and against the priorities of the Canadian people.