Mr. Speaker, I am happy to co-operate. I will call the party by its proper name.
One thing I would ask the movers of the motion today to take into consideration is that one of the reasons we are having a difficult time administering complicated government programs might be the fact that the ruling party, the government, has been cutting, hacking and slashing jobs in the public sector to such a degree that it is perhaps getting more difficult to actually do the necessary follow up on these programs. Under the questions and comments portion of my speech, perhaps we could talk about that somewhat. How can we possibly take 50,000 jobs out of the public sector, increase the workload and still expect the same access to services?
The public sector has been cut, reduced and slashed to the point where even right-wing analysts are looking at the public service and wondering if they have gone too far; if they will have to do a massive hiring to try to plug some of the massive holes that were left.
Every time the government cuts the public sector it seems to cut the people who are most valuable, the people in the middle band of experience, the people who have been there for 20 years and maybe would take an early option, an opportunity to retire earlier. We cannot replace those people overnight. It is not like flicking a light switch on and off. Once we cut those 50,000 jobs we cannot just say tomorrow that we went too far and we should get them back. They are not coming back. They have already slipped away and the damage has already been done. We are fond of saying that some cuts do not heal. The cuts to the public sector will not heal easily and certainly not overnight.
Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Vancouver East.
One of the real motivations that the official opposition had in putting this motion forward was to draw criticism again to public spending programs like the transitional jobs fund. This is a sensitive point for myself as well coming from the riding of Winnipeg Centre. We were horrified to learn, even though we are the third poorest riding in the country, with unemployment levels of 13% and 14%, the third lowest per capita income per family and the highest incidence of poverty, that we did not qualify for any of the transitional jobs fund money. We were just as horrified as anybody else that the Minister of HRDC's riding qualified with an unemployment rate of about 7% and my riding, with an unemployment rate of almost 14%, did not qualify. The public certainly needed to know that something untoward was going on with that one particular program.
When the government was pressed on the issue more and more facts started to surface, things that people cannot be comfortable with. All Canadians were shocked as the truth started to surface. The House leader for the government side had his binder ready and any time a member from one of the ridings stood up to question this, it would be thrown back to the member “You probably qualify for all kinds of other grants. You might not get any transitional jobs fund grants but you do get other kinds of HRDC spending”. We do and we appreciate that.
In the process of this debate, we learned that my riding gets more HRDC funding than any other riding in the country. I am quite proud of that. It means that the people in my riding have been aggressively trying to get some federal spending going on in the inner city of Winnipeg. As transfer payments are cut or reduced year after year, we needed to get that flow of dollars coming to us in some way or another. Thankfully, the people in my riding have been creative enough, quite often with the help of our office, to avail themselves of the various programs that can help the situation in my riding.
We have watched the federal transfer payments dwindle. In the short time that I have paying attention to politics, we have seen the established program funding system chucked out the window and in its place we saw the Canada health and social transfer.
This is something that the National Council on Welfare called the most disastrous social policy initiative this country has ever seen. It could see the writing on the wall that when the Canada health and social transfer came in there was going to be trouble. Really what the federal government was trying to do was distance itself from any obligation to social spending across the country and to offload that burden on to the provinces.
First the government provided block funding for health, post secondary education and social services, then it started dwindling it away. From $19 billion worth of CHST, with the bat of an eye it went to $11.5 billion per year for all the provinces. Now the government is slowly inching it back up a billion at a time. I think it is back up to $14.5 billion in total spending.
We are supposed to toot the government's horn and cheer that it is going to put some of the money back which has been cut so drastically from that side of social spending, but really it is still four or five billion dollars short from when the CHST was initiated in 1996.
So it is a bit of a smoke and mirrors game and it leaves us no choice but to aggressively go after any kind of program spending that we possibly can in the riding of Winnipeg Centre.
To sum up my brief remarks today, I am disappointed that the Reform Party, or the former Reform Party, could not have been more creative in choosing a topic for debate today. It certainly must be completely devoid of ideas if the worst thing it can accuse the government of is being poor bookkeepers. There are plenty of other travesties that the government is guilty of which we would love to point out had we the opportunity to choose the subject of debate today.