SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Hon. Mike Lake

  • Member of Parliament
  • Conservative
  • Edmonton—Wetaskiwin
  • Alberta
  • Voting Attendance: 66%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $178,671.82

  • Government Page
  • Apr/24/23 6:17:28 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, since we are having this conversation, I have a couple of points on this. It is interesting that we are supposed to be talking about the budget today. The NDP and Liberal members have agreed to have this debate here in this House because they do not want to talk about the budget, including all the challenges with the budget and the economic disaster that reflects the previous approach taken by a different Prime Minister Trudeau back in the seventies and eighties. It is also interesting that the debate we are talking about today is something that the coalition could decide to have any day, if they wanted to. Any day, NDP and Liberal members could decide to move legislation to accomplish exactly what we are talking about today. Instead, they have chosen to do this in a different way, using up valuable House time when we could be talking about the budget. If it was something that was important to them, they could do it on their own through their coalition. I am not on the immigration committee, but my understanding is that parties have worked collaboratively on that committee. I understand that the senator who moved this Senate public bill did not want to move beyond the scope to the degree that we are talking about right now. This goes way beyond the scope of the bill. It is very unusual to see this approach. It is sad. First of all, it is an important issue that deserves to be discussed seriously. The bill itself is a bill that members from all parties of the House should be able to support. Instead, we have this political gamesmanship of sorts today. It seems that this is all because the NDP and Liberal members do not want to talk about a disastrous budget. What we are not talking about today, because we are talking about this, is an approach with the budget that projects endless deficits into the future. If we look at the impact of this budgeting approach, again, we only need to look back to the Trudeau government of the seventies and eighties to see what that disastrous approach would look like. In those years, there was a deficit in 14 out of 15 years. The then Trudeau government came into power with almost no debt in Canada and left with a generational debt. It was a debt that, a generation later, required another Liberal government in the late nineties, the Chrétien-Martin Liberal government—
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