Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Given that we just received the budget address yesterday, very well delivered by our Minister of Finance, I must say. Many minutes of speaking on many pages, I said he didn’t skip or miss a word the whole budget.
On the matter of how we get to the budget and the speech that Mr. Miltenberger delivered yesterday, the address that he delivered, I’d just like to talk about a few anomalies as I see them.
We as Regular Members sit on standing committees that consider the business plans. The departments come to our standing committees, they outline for us what the activity of their departments is going to be, and we have some input. Mind you, a lot of the time that we spend looking at this is us receiving information about what the department is doing. However, even after that it is still received at a very high level. Those of us on this side of the House do not really get a close-up, first-hand kind of look at what goes on in the departments. The numbers that we get are large numbers, generally speaking, and they refer to activities which are also rather large. So if during this process we do come up with a creative idea for a change in focus or a new, modest initiative, we then feed that information back to the government. Alas, by the time it gets to them, it’s generally too late to include it in the budget.
These are anomalies that I see from my perspective and I’m sure the Cabinet could agree or disagree. It’s too late to work them in there, so now we are left with what other options do we have to bring that kind of input and suggestion and change to the process that we would want from this side of the House.
We’re often told that when there is such an initiative or change in policy, or focus, or priority, that the government has no money. So if you want that, Regular Members, then you need to look at the budget and find where you want to cut. I have a problem with that. We’re not in a position to look at that budget and see where we want to cut. Do you notice that when the government has an initiative? Often it will happen, interestingly, and they will say, oh, we have funded that from within. We do not have that opportunity on this side of the House to find out where there could be some money within a department to fund anything that we want as a priority or as an initiative.
I think that when we come up with these ideas, I don’t think the response should be from the Cabinet, well, you decide where you want to delete something. Because that’s all we have the ability to do, is delete when it comes to the budget. I think we should turn that back to the Cabinet and we should say, this is our priority, you find the money, you tell us what you’re going to cut.
