Rob Merrifield

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, June 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, we have a Liberal government that is made up. That is the pathetic thing about what has gone on. Our leader has been totally consistent with what went on in Bill C-43. We said it was not good for the country until we got it amended. We could not support it and never did support it until we got the amendments and then we supported it reluctantly. We said that it was still not enough to throw this government out over, let us support it. That was a consistent message right from beginning to end.

I believe that my hon. colleague understands that full well. The Canadian people do as well. The Canadian people will deal with this government because of what it has done to democracy in this country. It has to stop. It has to stop now. The Canadian people will do that.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, June 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I can hardly hear myself. There is just too much noise, but I can understand them being irritated because they have cheapened themselves and it became exposed. I can certainly understand that. Why would they not feel that way? Perhaps they have some answering to do. I believe they will have answering to the Canadian public to do in the next election, as the government will, because I do not believe the Canadian people have been fooled by what has gone on in the last two months. They will discern that. They will understand it full well. They will deal with it. I look forward to that opportunity.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, June 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, there is a lot of dialogue over there. I can understand that it is a little defensive, because we are hearing from an individual who is prepared to sell his vote and cheapen himself to the point where he would actually sacrifice the democracy of the country in order to put forward a budget in the way Bill C-48 came forward. Actually, I have a difficult time seeing it as a budget. It is illegitimate. I find it absolutely inappropriate.

We see that kind of desperation from the individuals in the NDP when they ask questions like that. What happened with the vote on Bill C-43, if my hon. colleague is serious about understanding what actually happened there, was that Bill C-43 was not a bill we thought we could accept. We sat down and said we would get it into committee and that when we got it into committee we would ask for amendments. We were able to get the amendments. We were not like the NDP who said they would take all the money and illegitimately spend it.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, June 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to answer that question because I thought I had laid it out fairly clearly that I thought Bill C-48 was an illegitimate cooked up budget that was not about the money but was about trying to support an illegitimate government.

The hon. member wants to know why we supported Bill C-43. We supported it because we were able to make some needed amendments to it in committee. Although Bill C-43 was the biggest spending budget we have seen in a decade, we were not overly concerned with it. With the amendments we said that it was not everything but in a minority we try to move the debate along and try to do what is in the best interests of Canadians and we decided to support it so we could move on.

However Bill C-48 was an illegitimately cooked up, 400 full words, made in a room in Toronto, and the hon. member thinks that is okay and that is the way we should run this country. I find that absolutely amazing. He has been here for a considerable amount of time and he understands how the process works. What would that say if we said that was okay to all those people we consulted on Bill C-43 and who had an opportunity for input, including the NDP, by the way, who said that if it was a priority we should get on with it?

What should we say to those individuals who had input on Bill C-43 when the government completely reverses it and comes up with Bill C-48? Worse than that, it does one offs and adds another $20-some billion of spending on top of that to try to prepare for an election for the Canadian public. That is what is absolutely pathetic and unbelievable when we look at what has happened here.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, June 22nd, 2005]

Yes, a very desperate party doing desperate things.

I just want to pick up on the comments made by my colleagues who suggested that the Liberal Party always does what is in the best interests of Canadians, particularly when it comes to health care. It is something I just cannot leave alone because I am very passionate about protecting our health care system. I understand that Canadians are very concerned about it. Many people are dying while they are on wait lists for health services that they cannot get.

A year ago during the election campaign, we laid out our platform before the Canadian people. It is not about the opposition trying to take down a government that is in power. It is about laying an alternative before the people of Canada so they have the opportunity to discern what is in their best interests. We laid out our health care platform during the election campaign. We indicated the number of dollars that would be needed for health care in the next number of years to sustain it in the short term. Our plan was to make sure that would take place.

The Liberal government did exactly the same thing. The Liberals accused us of having too rich a budget, that we could not afford it, that it was going to break the bank and there was no way in the world that Canada could afford the number of dollars the Conservative Party had suggested. It is interesting. Just think about this. The election was in June and by September we had the 2004 accord. The first ministers sat down with the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister said, “We are going to fix health care for a generation”.

There was no possible way that was going to happen, and it certainly did not. Nonetheless the numbers, the dollar figures that came out of that, which we hear the Liberal government bragging about intently, were not the numbers on which the Liberals went to Canadians last June to ask for a mandate to support health care. The dollar numbers that were actually agreed on were in fact almost identical to the numbers in our budget, which were double the amount of dollars for health care.

We understand that health care is a priority. We understand that people are dying on wait lists. What we cannot understand is a government that over the last decade has pulled $25 billion out of health care.

When the Liberals cooked up a deal with the NDP in order to stay in power, it is interesting that the NDP did not recognize the importance of health care and tried to come up with a way of fixing it, not just for the next decade but for the generation beyond the next 10 years.

The real challenge in health care is not whether it should be a more private or a more public health care. The real challenge is how to sustain it over the next 30 to 40 years as the baby boomer bubble hits our system and, at the same time, understand that when the demand on health care and the amount of money that will have to be put into it will be coming at a time when we will have a diminishing number of taxpayers paying for the service. Therefore we have a significant problem.

We do not have time to play politics with health care any more, as has been happening over the last decade under the Liberal government. It is unbelievable that we see that kind of dishonesty in health care and that kind of dishonesty in budgeting. It is an abomination and it is something that Canadians really have to discern.

I do not think Canadians will be fooled by the government. I do not think they will be fooled by the display of what went on to get Bill C-48 here this evening. They understand that this is a desperate government propped up by a party that has never had an opportunity to do anything and probably never will. The NDP members had an opportunity to stay true to their conscience. They say they are the great defenders of democracy and yet we see what they did. They threw democracy in the air for $4.6 billion. It is an unbelievable situation.

Why I have spent most of my time so far talking about Bill C-48 is because Bill C-48 is not the real issue. The real issue is how we could treat democracy in such a pathetic way and cook up a deal in a hotel room by desperate people trying to stay in power. It is not about Canadians and it is not about the $4.6 billion because after the $4.6 billion what did we see? We saw $26 billion being applied to try to buy off the Canadian public prior to what the Liberals thought was going to be an election.

The Liberals tried to buy off Quebec. They bought off the NDP. They tried to buy off the Canadian electorate. If that was not bad enough, they had to try to buy opposition votes because they needed a few more and they were able to do that by offering and giving power. They not only offer dollars but they offer power.

We ask ourselves why Canadians are so cynical about this place and how politics have deteriorated in this country. I say to everyone in the House that we had better soberly understand and think about what we are trying to do here and who we are trying to support. It is not each other nor is it our parties. It is the people of Canada. Too many times the members of the House forget that. We do it in a matter of days around here. It seems to be a very easy thing to fall into that trap. I think we need to understand that.

Let us look at Bill C-48 and discern what Bill C-48 is actually saying. It talks about $4.6 billion but the dollars are not well planned out and there are no accountability measures. What happens to that money?

The ad scam, one of the reasons that we are here, is a perfect example of what happens. Money was misappropriated and it went to places that it should not have gone to, propping up the Liberal government. We have seen other examples of it with the gun registry. The Liberal government made a promise that Canadians would only pay $2 million for that registry and it is now closer to $2 billion. Submarines are another example of the inappropriate use of money. We have seen HRDC and Shawinigan. We could just go on and on.

We could go into each one of those in detail and perhaps we should just to remind the Canadian public how badly the Liberal government treats the Canadian purse when it starts doing these one-offs without any accountability measures. If we want to add some confidence of the Canadian public in this House that has to stop.

This House has a long history of serving the country, which is one of the greatest countries in the world, but it should not be one of the greatest, it should be the greatest. No country in the world has the amount of resources and wealth that Canada has with a population of 32 million. We should be leading the nation in every sector and in every way. We should be an example of how a country should be run. In some ways we do it in spite of the government because we have lots to be proud of, but we could be so much more and so much better. It is a shame that we have to run a government the way we have and the way we are doing it under this piece of legislation.

What we are talking about here is money. Let us look at some of the priorities of the NDP when it was prepared to sell its soul. The number one issue in my riding and from coast to coast is agriculture. I do not know where the NDP votes are really coming from or why it is not thinking of the Canadian people, but the number one issue in my riding is agriculture. The BSE issue has hit them in a way that has never hit the agriculture industry before.

In my riding it is doubly bad because there were two years of drought and grasshopper problems and on top of that they have now had two years of the BSE crisis. Farmers are in suicidal situations. Many of them are visiting my office and many of them are calling. It is an unbelievable situation in agriculture and the NDP cooks up what it says is a deal of a lifetime and forgets to even think about what is actually happening with the number one issue in the country with regard to a serious crisis situation.

The Liberal government has also failed the agricultural community. In budget after budget we have seen its priorities and the message it is sending to the farmers and producers is that they should get out of agriculture. That has to stop. We do not understand just how serious a situation it is and how important it is to be able to support it.

We all realized that this was a cooked up budget for all the wrong reasons but it was there. What were we going to do about it? When it got into committee we tried to address some of the concerns. We wanted to put some sanity around it. We tried to put a plan in place so that the government would at least be responsible enough, even though it was going to spend the money, to ensure the money would be applied in an appropriate way. That sounded reasonable to me and it makes no sense whatsoever why the Liberals failed to do that.

When it comes to accountability for that money, there needs to be a plan and some accountability measures around it or we will see the same kind of misuse of funds that we have seen in many of these other programs.

The first change we requested was to clause 2 and accountability was in clause 3. In clause 1 we wanted to make sure the government did not forget that it had a $500 billion debt load. We wanted the government to understand that the debt had to be dealt with or we would be dealing with some serious problems down the road because the economy does not usually go straight up. It usually has some bumps along the way. A good, prudent manager would understand that something like that would happen.

Not only that, a good, prudent manager would have a slush fund, which we have. It is a $4 billion slush fund. However the NDP deal took half of that away and now the slush fund is only $2 billion. We are sitting on dangerous ground and we are being asked to come into this House and support it. We are asked to come in here and debate it in the wee hours of the evening and try to come up with a reason why we should support a budget that would do this to the tax purse of the Canadian public. There is no reason that I can think of and it is an absolutely unbelievable thing.

Not only did this cooked up deal take the $4.6 billion out of it but it also tried to eliminate the tax reductions. We know that if the government can apply $26 billion to it, it also has extra money.

In closing, I would like to move:

That the motion be amended by adding:

And the committee report back no later than December 16, 2005.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, June 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to speak on behalf of the constituents of Yellowhead with regard to this piece of legislation, if we can call it that. Before we can get into a serious dialogue with regard to this two page $4.6 billion disaster, we have to understand exactly how we got to the point where late on a June evening we are speaking to a piece of legislation that was brought forward in such an unorthodox way.

I listened intently to my colleagues from the other parties speak to this legislation. I do not for one minute believe the reason we are talking about it today is the $4.6 billion or all of the noble things the bill is supposed to provide to the Canadian people. This 400 word document was cooked up in a backroom of some hotel in Toronto by a labour party organization, a desperate Prime Minister and the leader of the NDP. We have to examine what really went on and why it came forward in the first place.

It certainly was not a noble plan that was decided upon because of astute people thinking this was the appropriate thing to do. It was actually a sellout by a desperate Prime Minister who would do almost anything to stay in power because of the scandal his government was caught in. Not only is it the scandal of the decade, but I believe it will go down as the worst thing in Canadian history that we have seen in the House.

It has created a considerable amount of cynicism among the people in my riding and across the country. They see what is going on in this place and ask if that is what federal politics and the federal government have really boiled down to. Has it gotten to the point where it is all about cooking up a backroom deal to try to save one's political hide and stay in power illegitimately?

That is really what this $4.6 billion is all about. That is what the deal was all about. It was the price the NDP charged the Liberal Party for garnering the NDP's 19 votes to support a corrupt government and allow it to stay in power.

If that were not bad enough, the government over the last decade did the same sort of thing for the province of Quebec. It tried to prop up the Liberal Party of Canada illegitimately through the abomination of the ad scam. The Gomery inquiry has allowed Canadians to examine very clearly and understand in a more fulsome way than ever before just how terrible it was, what went on behind the scenes and the amount of corruption involved. Millions of dollars were being passed around in brown envelopes to try to prop up the Liberal Party. That scandal makes the Watergate scandal in the United States a few decades ago look like child's play. Canadians look at this and become very cynical.

It is amazing when one sees what is actually happening in Quebec. No wonder the Liberal Party has absolutely tanked in the province of Quebec. The writers of soap operas would have to work overtime to keep up with the drama that this place has provided for the people of Quebec as they watch the amount of corruption. Sex, war and violence make for a good soap opera and it seems we have had that here in the last few months. That absolutely has to stop. It is almost at the point where members of Parliament on this side when they go home on weekends have to take multiple showers just to clean the sleaze off from what we see in the House.

I put my name on a ballot to try to garner the support and trust of the people in my constituency of Yellowhead. I took that on as a very important and honoured position. I have come to the House to represent them in way which allows them to hold their heads high.

I think each member needs to understand that we are here not because of our self-interest but because of the interests of the people we represent. Too many members forget that too quickly after an election. We had an election a year ago. We have seen what it will take for a party to try to stay in power. I find it absolutely amazing when I see that happen.

Let us get on to the actual piece of legislation. Before we get to Bill C-48, we have to talk about its precursor, which is Bill C-43, and understand how it came about.

Bill C-43 is the biggest spending budget we have seen in a decade. An amazing amount of dollars is in Bill C-43. When the budget was first handed down, it went through a process as normal budgets do. There was a lot of consultation, a lot of input. In a minority government it is very important that the government sit down and talk to all parties intently to have their input into the budget. Bill C-43 had a fair amount of that, more than we have seen in other budgets. The House can understand that because it is a minority government and we need to respect that.

When Bill C-43 came forward, although not everything was in the best interests of Canadians, we thought there was certainly enough there that was better than we had seen before. There were some things that needed to be changed in committee. We sat on our hands for the first vote to get the bill into committee so we could address some of the serious problems.

We certainly needed to deal with the CEPA amendments. We certainly needed to deal with making sure that the budget represented the population and that it was in the best interests of all Canadians.

We have to understand what the finance minister said about the budget . He said that we could not run this country by one-offs, that we could not just cherry-pick and apply money illegitimately, without a plan or a purpose and without full consultation. What we saw coming out of this budget was exactly that because the government not only tried to stay in power illegitimately after the NDP budget, which is Bill C-48, but it tried to stay in power through Bill C-43.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, June 21st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague's questions give me an opportunity to actually help him a little. I know that he has been here for some considerable amount of time, but perhaps he has missed some of what actually takes place in this place.

I have only been here since 2000, so I see things from a fresh perspective. Let us look at what happened with this piece of legislation compared to what happened with Bill C-43, which went through all the stages of the process. The committee members travelled and we dialogued with Canadians from coast to coast on Bill C-43 to see if it would address the situation of where to spend the money in this next year. Budgets are very important because they lay that out for Canadians.

This bill, Bill C-48, did not go through that process. It went through an amazing process: a hotel room with three individuals, four hundred words, no accountability, no planning and no deciding on how the money should be spent or what priorities should be set.

That is why this is an abomination. Because it did not go through the proper process, what it did was make a mockery of the budgets of this country. It also made a mockery of this place, because it was about buying votes. It was not about the Canadian people. As for anyone who gets up on the other side and says this is about the Canadian people, I will tell them that it is not. The money was spent there, but it was not for them. It was actually for buying favour to be able to keep a government illegitimately in power. That absolutely has to stop. It has to be addressed.

Who is going to address it? There is only one group that is powerful enough to address it. That is the Canadian public. Members of the Canadian public see what is going on. They understand exactly what went on here and they will address it at an appropriate time. In the next election, I look forward to explaining that to the people of Canada. The people of Canada are not fooled by this sort of thing. They will address it. I very much look forward to that.

The hon. member talked about some of the amendments. Our amendments were made to try to add some sanity to what went on in that hotel room. First of all, one amendment was about paying off the debt. That was in clause one. Clause two was to put a plan together to make sure that money was not wasted or misspent. Clause three was to add some accountability to what was going on with this piece of legislation and the dollars being spent.

That is the answer for my hon. colleague. I am absolutely appalled that he would ask such a question, because he has been around this place long enough that he should have known those exact facts.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, June 21st, 2005]

That has raised a bit of a note with the Liberals, I see. I believe that is appropriate, because they should be feeling shameful about the way they have treated this country.

They should have used that money for better jobs and post-secondary education. It should be used to help people start families, buy a house or save for retirement. It was $3,200 plus per year that came right out of the pockets of the families of this country. It is absolutely an abomination. It should stop. It is not about the money as much as it is the corruption. I have had enough of it.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to Make Certain Payments, June 21st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to add my dialogue to this debate at report stage of Bill C-48 on behalf of the people of Yellowhead.

I would like to begin where my hon. colleague finished and ask a question. How did we get into this mess? How did we actually get to position where we are deciding and trying to discern what to do with this piece of legislation?

I see it a little differently than my colleague. He said that it is all about a minority government and that the Canadian people want a minority government to work. To that point, I would agree.

If that was a fact and the government wanted to work together collaboratively with the parties to bring forward legislation in the best interests of Canadians, it would have added that negotiating power and negotiations would have happened in Bill C-43, not Bill C-48. A plan could have been set out along with the criteria around that plan and how it would be delivered.

It would not have happened in a Toronto hotel room as a desperation move by a government that will go down in history as the most corrupt government to serve the Canadian public. It would not have been done with the input of the labour movement.

It would have had some of the accountability measures that we need to have in place with all legislation, particularly in light of what has happened with the government with regard to the lack of accountability and the lack of planning that we have seen. If we are to be honest in this place when we come here to debate, we should do it with the knowledge and the full understanding of what actually happened.

The NDP members decided that they were going to sell themselves with regard to their votes and prop up this corrupt government. They said “What can we get for that? Let's go into the hotel room and see what we can get. Let's name our price”.

Let us take a look at that price and take a look at what they actually got. Once the NDP members were prepared to sell themselves, in the sense of giving a vote to prop the government up when things looked very desperate, they said “Let's set our priorities”.

I know what happened with the priorities in my riding. We have gone through significant difficulty in rural Alberta with regard to the BSE crisis. Before that we had two years of drought and grasshopper problems, and Atlantic Canada and central Canada had to help to contribute to some of the causes with the hay aid program.

It was a devastating situation for agriculture. Agriculture has never been in the situation that it is right now. We have a government that has failed farmers time and time again. In fact, the farmers of my riding are so desperate that they are really not sure what to do. Many are at the stage where they are losing everything.

When a farmer loses everything, it is not just that he loses his job, but he loses his whole life and in many cases the family history. Many of these farms are generational farms. It is a devastating situation.

What is the NDP priority? There is not a word for agriculture. There is not a bit of help for agriculture. It is not only western Canadians involved with agriculture in Alberta. Agriculture from coast to coast in this country is facing the same situation and the same difficulties.

After deciding to do what was in the best interests of Canadians, surely the NDP would have this as a part of its priority. It was not so. We have seen that it cooked up this little deal with 400 words on a sheet of paper and brought it forward saying that it would bring in this new piece of legislation, Bill C-48. It has no criteria on how it will be spent. It has no accountability and no plan. I suggest also that its priorities are not necessarily in the best interests of Canadians.

If it was about a government that wanted to do what was in the best interests of Canadians, this budget would have been negotiated in Bill C-43. We have to be honest here. The honest part of Bill C-48 is that is not what happened.

How much money was actually spent in this House in the last two months for the benefit of Canadians? If we look at it from that perspective, we can see that the price tag on this was $4.5 billion. However, we have to accumulate that on top of all the announcements that the government made to buy votes, not only the NDP votes which cost $4.5 billion. We must add to that another $22 billion. A total of $26 billion of Canadian money has been spent to illegitimately prop up the government. That is the reality of the situation we are in.

However, it did not stop there because that was not quite enough. The Liberals needed the 19 votes from the NDP to stay in power. However, that still was not good enough. They had to buy some opposition members. We saw that happen, as well, in this House.

It is the most disgraceful thing because it is not about the money and it is not about where the money went. It is about respecting the role of a parliamentarian in this House and respecting the very democracy that we try to protect for the benefit of all the people back home in each of our ridings.

I have become as cynical as some of the people back home when I talk to them about politicians because it reflects badly not only on the Liberal Party and the NDP but on every one of us in this House. I almost feel like we have to go home on weekends and shower multiple times just to get some of the sleaze off from what we see happening in this House because it is not in the best interests of Canadians. It is not in the best interest of this House or democracy, or this great nation, one of the greatest nations in this world.

What can we do? We should be concerned about the content of the actual piece of legislation, Bill C-48, because of what we have seen the government do with regard to other knee-jerk reactive measures and programs. If we want to know what individuals are going to do, look at what they have done and that will tell us where they are going.

If we look at the Davis Inlet project, the government's knee-jerk reaction was to relocate the Inuit natives at a cost of $400,000 per individual. That did not solve the problem. HRDC was another scandal. The gun registry that was promised at a cost of $2 million and that has ended up costing $2 billion is an absolute disaster. That is continuing on a daily basis and a yearly basis. I think last year it cost 125 million more dollars.

Then we look at ad scam, the mother of all scandals, trying to buy off Quebeckers. No wonder Quebeckers are so slighted by what is happening because they take it as a personal slight. The government cheapened Quebeckers by the way it handled the ad scam.

Not only did the Liberals try to buy Quebeckers, in the last two months they tried to buy Canadians and then opposition members. It is an absolute abomination to this House and everything that is good about this place and good about Canada.

That is why the opposition is so upset with this piece of legislation. The piece of legislation is coming forward with no plan and no accountability measures. It will just go down as a $4.6 billion ad scam or a $4.6 billion gun registry because of what will actually happen.

If we want to know what will happen with this money, just look at what the government has done with past projects and that will tell us exactly where it is going. It is unfortunate that we see this sort of thing happen in this House because it is a terrible situation for Canadians.

How are we going to fix that? At report stage, we have an opportunity, after coming out of committee, to put forward some amendments in order to put some sanity around the ridiculous situation that we have seen in this House over the last couple of months.

We put forward a plan. We must repay the debt load that governments in the past have built up. We have to look at how we deal with that. We put forward an amendment for that one. We put forward an amendment to put a plan around this money so that we do not allow it to turn into another scandal. We want to put some accountability in there as well.

We moved three amendments that would address all three of those things and we hoped that the government would accept those as we moved forward in the debate at report stage, so that we could actually see some good come out of it.

I believe that Canada is the greatest nation in the world and I believe most people in this House and most people in this country do as well. However, it has not achieved what it should have achieved. The reason it has not is that we have a government that has not really taken the opportunity to develop, what I like to call, the Canadian dream. This cooked-up deal will take 3,000 plus dollars out of the pockets of every family in this country.

That is exactly what has happened. That is money that could have been used to raise the standard of living, money that could have been used to help every Canadian achieve their Canadian dream and be the envy of the world. I would challenge anyone to say what population of 32 million people has the amount of resources that Canadians have.

We should be the envy of the world. We should have the highest standard of living in the world, which we do not, even though we have the best of everything. The government should be leading this nation instead of being an abomination on some of the issues where it is not doing the job.

[Health, June 21st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister says that he is opposed to a two tier health system, but he gets his health care from a private clinic.

Correctional Service of Canada spent $31 million on medical clinics and suppliers last year. The RCMP spent almost $250 million on medical clinics. Neither distinguished between a privately owned clinic or a publicly owned clinic.

The real question is why do the likes of Clifford Olson and Paul Bernardo get health care ahead of ordinary Canadians?