Jim Peterson

[Committees Of The House, October 4th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to table before the House the 18th report of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance.

The report deals with Bill C-9, the bill just mentioned in the House. It was passed unanimously by the committee yesterday.

I thank members of all parties who were there and who assisted us so diligently in our work.

[Points Of Order, October 4th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on the same point of order.

The hon. member for Gander-Grand Falls referred to Standing Order 80 which would preclude a Senate bill coming to the finance committee if it dealt with aids and supplies. This is not an aid or supply.

As the hon. parliamentary secretary has indicated, it has been the custom of the House for as long as I can recall to have tax treaty amendments of which there have been probably 70 or 80 in the past decade and a half originate in the Senate. I commend the Senate for the excellent job it has done in dealing with these very complicated and detailed pieces of legislation. It is not an area where those who

have not done a lot of work and a lot of study are really capable of assessing the implications.

I concur with the hon. parliamentary secretary. This is not an aid or supply. This has been our tradition. It has worked very well. This is an excellent piece of legislation, supported by all members of the House.

[Points Of Order, September 27th, 1995]

Absolutely, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.

[Points Of Order, September 27th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I am guilty and I withdraw. I ask your advice as to what other word might express better my utter repugnance for this type of question in our House of Commons.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1995, June 6th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member was right when he said that the poor should be a concern for every party and every member in this House.

He also referred to the deficits. Indeed, the federal deficits were the responsibility of the Conservative and Liberal governments, just like the Quebec deficit is now the responsibility of the PQ government, whose last budget did not do much to solve the problem. I urge all provincial governments in Canada to rise to the challenge and do what we are trying to do now.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1995, June 6th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for Terrebonne for his questions. First, as regards the public service, the minister and the committee insisted on some form of co-operation between the unions and the government concerning substitution, that is that the retirement arrangement must be accepted by individual public servants. Perhaps, and I hope so, in the next three years, all government retirees will follow the course of substitution making use of the generous benefits offered by the government.

Secondly, as concerns national standards in education, neither our committee, nor the minister nor the budget will require national standards in education. This is surely part of the negotiations undertaken by the Minister of Human Resources Development.

In listening to all the witnesses, we were very grateful to a group that suggested the standards in the area of education be not national, but international, standards of knowledge and excellence, given the area is a competitive one.

And we, like all Canadians, in Quebec, in British Columbia or in any province or territory, must take international competition and our own system of education across Canada into account, if we are really to take advantage of it.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1995, June 6th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, with respect to the public service, we will not do away with the public service act or the protection which any public servant has through the Public Service Commission and the rules regarding employment equity. If the hon. member thinks we are, he is wrong.

The beauty of the way we are going about the layoff is that it is being undertaken in consultation and in co-operation with the public sector unions as well as with management in Treasury Board and the various departments. That is why we have something which can work and which will achieve the level of substitution on a voluntary basis that we were hoping for.

In terms of PUITTA, members will understand that in the last budget year we spent $249 million reimbursing public utilities which had been privatized and which were in the provinces. We were reimbursing them for the income tax we collected.

How did they get into the private sector in the provinces anyway? They were privatized originally by the provincial governments in order to make them more efficient and in order to create capital funds for deficit reduction for the provinces. Now they are working in the private sector. They were a function and a creation of the provincial governments.

These utilities and the provincial governments were insisting that we continue to give them $249 million a year. Were the provinces prepared to rebate the corporate taxes collected by the provinces to these utilities? Not one was, even though they were creations of the provincial governments. If the provincial governments are not prepared to rebate the corporate taxes to them, why should the federal government? It is a real anomaly.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1995, June 6th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, approximately a year ago Canada began an incredible transformation, a change that has had a profound impact on all of us in this Chamber and on Canadians everywhere.

I am talking about finally coming to grips with our national debt, which over the years has now reached the unconscionable level of $550 billion and which demands so much of our interest that one-third of all of the tax revenue paid by Canadians to the federal government goes just to pay the interest. One-quarter of all federal government expenditures today are simply to pay the interest on our debt, let alone not paying it down at all. We have had to come to grips with that, and ever increasing annual debt adding to it. It has not been easy.

In the past governments have always been in the mode of giving things to people, of increasing programs, of increasing expenditures. Maybe it does not come easily to a lot of us to start to look at the reality and come to grips with our debt and deficit crisis. We have done it. One of the amazing things that we on the finance committee learned as we travelled across the country is that Canadians, from the richest to the poorest, all said we must get the deficit and debt under control. There was a lot of legitimate debate on how to go about it, but as we opened up the

public hearings Canadians were committed to the reality that we had to find a new way of doing things.

In the budget bill before us, Bill C-76, we have really attacked what in the past have been three sacred cows in Canadian government. The first is the western grain transportation subsidy, which for all of this century has given an incredible subsidy to grain farmers in the west to help them get their grain to market and to help them be competitive in what is really a dirty international market wracked and plagued by subsidies of enormous quantities in many countries.

It will not be easy for our prairie farmers. There are transitional provisions to help ease the burden and help them find ways to bear some of the brunt of the burden. It is not easy for us to have to say that this can no longer be the way we do business.

The second sacred cow we have had to gore is our public service. We have had to cut 14 per cent of our public service, or 45,000 public service jobs over the next three years. This is not easy for us. Those of us who have been in government for a long time realize that we are fortunate have a highly competent public service, with people who could be earning much more in the private sector but who feel they have a pride in actually serving their government.

This tradition was built up in Canada over this century, a position of great pride in our public service. Names that come to mind are the Robertsons, the John Holmes, and people who gave Canada a name internationally because of their intelligence and their commitment. They were the ones who got us into international peacekeeping. We can find individuals like this in every department.

For us to say we have to cut them, let us say to our public servants that we recognize that maybe they do not deserve it. They do not. We recognize they have made a great contribution to our country, and it is with heavy hearts that we have to put 45,000 people on the street.

There are a couple of ways you can do it. We went through a program review. Every program was looked at to see if it could be eliminated or whether it could be done better elsewhere or whether it was really necessary in order to eliminate expenditures and bring down the deficit.

The normal way to go about making the cuts is that all those people in a program that is axed would be asked to leave the public service. There are severance packages. We are contributing a large amount of money to ease the burden of transition from public to private life. However, we would be losing many very competent public servants if that were the way we were to proceed. From a management point of view it is quick and certain. After we on the finance committee listened at length to many of the public service unions we thought there might be a better way. We learned from them that there are people in many departments who might want to take the early retirement package and leave the public service, even if their program or department was not going to be axed.

The concept of substitution came out. The government tried to negotiate with the public sector unions and they almost had an agreement on how all the cuts could be made on a voluntary basis. At the last minute the agreement did not come about.

In listening to the witnesses we determined it would be very important to approximate some type of voluntary substitution program. Those who wanted to avail themselves of the early retirement package could, and people could switch from one department to another.

We were told all of these 45,000 jobs could be replaced on a voluntary basis and we therefore have encouraged the ministers and the finance committee to do that recognizing that in many cases this might not be practical. We have also asked the public sector unions to work with the minister in not only the promulgation of the guidelines for alternates but also in their carrying out.

The minister has been very responsible in responding to these entreaties on our behalf and the unions. From what I understand we are to have a much more humane and practical way of downsizing the public service than if we took the easy way out. It may take longer but we will have public servants who want to stay in the public service.

The third sacred cow we have had to take on is transfer payments to the provinces. By way of brief background, under the current regime that has existed up until now we have four types of transfer payments from the federal government to the provinces. One is for equalization to the poorer provinces to give them a certain level of public service. In the budget we have not cut any of these equalization payments.

The second type of equalization payment is under the Canada assistance plan from the federal government to match the funds put forward by provinces to deal with Canadians who are in need or who suffer from disabilities, the most disadvantaged and the poor. The province establishes the program and we match its funding. There are very few controls or strings over this money right now.

The third area is established programs financing which has two components. One is for post-secondary education where there are no federal strings attached whatsoever. The second is for health. We have a number of strings on this. The Canada Health Act says a province has to meet the five criteria of the Canada Health Act or else we can cut back the funding.

We are cutting back the $7 billion of transfer payments over a two-year period. We do not do this with alacrity because we know how important expenditures in these areas are. If anybody thinks we can cut the deficit without cutting in this area, they are wrong.

Under this new regime there will be a combination of the three programs, the CAP, the EPF for post-secondary education, and the EPF transfers for health, into one transfer payment instead of the two; combining the two into one, called the Canada health and social transfer.

We have not touched equalization. In the bill we have mandated the Minister of Human Resources Development through mutual consent with the provinces to develop principles and objectives for social assistance and post-secondary education.

Members of the opposition and many Canadians who appeared before us said that if we continue on the trend established in the budget for the next two years we will run out of cash payments. There will be no more cash payments to the provinces. In some cases it will be after 4 years; in some cases maybe after 11 or 12 years.

How can the federal government have any voice? How can we have any voice if we do not have cash? This is why our committee recommended in the future there must be a cash component. What will this do?

For the first time where we have very few standards today the provinces will have a major voice in determining the standards applied.

Because the amount of the cash transfer under the Canada health and social transfer is to diminish by $7 million over two years, people say we will have less clout with the provinces to force them into national standards, objectives, shared principles or whatever.

The object is not to force the provinces into anything. We have said we want the minister to sit down with them and develop through mutual consent. That means talking with them about the principles they want. This does not mean we are imposing them.

In the future, supposing we agree on shared principles or objectives, we will still need some money as part of the cash transfer to the provinces to enforce standards such as with the Canada Health Act which we are not touching. This is why we went beyond the budget and did something which a finance committee has not done in the past to my knowledge. We not only reported Bill C-76 back to the House but we did so with an additional report, report 16 of the finance committee wherein we said that in future years future Ministers of Finance-we know it will be this one for a long time, many decades perhaps-must have a cash component in order to ensure the standards under the Canada Health Act or new standards developed with the consent of the provinces are enforced.

Another concern related to the most disadvantaged economically, those at the bottom of the heap, those who do not have jobs, single parents whose children are living in poverty, those who are not working and the working poor, those referred to as the ones who get welfare or social assistance which were part of the Canada assistance plan in the past.

In the Canada assistance plan we matched transfers but we are no longer doing it. It is all combined in one payment. We heard a tremendous amount of testimony from the National Anti-Poverty Organization, from community groups such as the one here in Ottawa working with the poor, giving them health care and other assistance through a number of volunteers, many right across the country.

The federal government is cutting its transfers to provinces that are not the neediest, those with the least political clout, the provinces that will stop giving them the money. We have no control now over whether the provinces give support to the needy. If they do, we will match it.

When the finance committee set out last fall to prepare for the budget, we reported we would have to make massive cuts. We said we did not want these cuts to be made on the backs of the poorest because they are already down and out. They are the ones who in many cases cannot stand more cuts.

This is why in our report to the House of Commons we urged the finance minister and particularly the Minister for Human Resources Development when he talks to the provinces to make sure the most in need are not the ones who are cut out of the programs, children in poverty, the working poor and the others who are not there.

We heard testimony from the National Anti-Poverty Organization that according to its best estimates only about 3 per cent of those who are on welfare today are abusing the system. Even if its figures were twice what it us they were, are the abuses of a few people sufficient to bring down our wrath on all of the people?

We have to be very careful when we are making these cuts that we have our priorities straight and that we do not prejudice those who are already the most vulnerable, those who are most deserving of our support in what we consider and always want to consider to be a compassionate and caring society.

Because we are combining the two or three transfers into one, even though it is smaller there will be greater economic clout in the short term to enforce standards that might be agreed to and to protect the five principles of the Canada Health Act.

Over the longer term and in the more distant future we are urging that future budgets retain a cash component so these principles can be observed.

I started off by saying our national debt is a crisis we could not ignore. Past governments have overspent. It is not for us, I believe, a fruitful course to say-

"It was the Liberals, it was the Conservatives, or because of the NDP's support". It is up to us, to all Canadians, all Members of Parliament from all parties to deal with crises and to do better to build a better future.

We have begun our all out battle against the deficit. We must do it fairly, humbly and with the knowledge that by doing something about it today, we can build a stronger and more prosperous Canada for our children and our children's children. Such is our duty, and we will do our duty.

[Committees Of The House, May 31st, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the 17th report of the Standing Committee of Finance on votes 1, 5 and 10 under national revenue in the main estimates for the fiscal year ending March 31, 1996.

May I thank the members from all parties for their splendid co-operation and constructive suggestions in our report.

[B'Nai Brith Canada, May 17th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, B'nai Brith Canada is our country's senior Jewish advocacy organization with a 120-year history.

Through its lodges, regional offices, League for Human Rights and Institute for International Affairs, it has built a national and international reputation for service to the community, promoting human rights and fostering tolerance and respect among all Canadians. It has been a world leader in the fight against racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination.

A grassroots membership organization, it has served the Jewish community and Canada with distinction on issues such as immigration and refugee policy, law enforcement, international human rights, the treatment of Jewish communities overseas, intergroup relations in Canada, as well as a host of charitable activities and voluntary action.

On the occasion of its annual meeting in Ottawa this weekend, I urge all members of the House to join me in applauding the work of B'nai Brith and in wishing it future success.