Mr. Speaker, it gives me pleasure to join the debate right after my Liberal colleague who has just spoken, especially since it is a question of cuts and the Liberals claim that they had left the country in good financial condition by reducing the debt.
The question that needs to be asked is the following: at whose expense was the reduction of the debt carried out?
The question of the member for Winnipeg Centre dealt with the fact that big businesses in Canada and their Bay Street friends are not obliged to pay income tax. Meanwhile, who has been cut? To whom has the debt been transferred?
For my part, I would like to remind the former finance minister—now the member for LaSalle—Émard, who was prime minister during a short period of time—that at the time of the cuts, he told Canadians to tighten their belts in order to pay down our debt because that debt must not be transferred to future generations. Yet, what the Liberal government of the day did, during its mandate, was to transfer the debt to future generations.
Today, the present government has not done any better since taking office. I will return to this subject later. For the moment, I want to consider Canada’s national debt. The Liberals like to tell us how hard and successfully they worked to reduce the debt, to reach a zero deficit and balance the budget.
For example, they transferred the debt to students. Today, most Canadian university students finish their studies with a debt of $40,000. I have already spoken about this matter in the House, and I even spoke about it during the election. I took part in a forum in the schools, where the students agreed on that amount. They even corrected me, calling me by name and telling me that I did not put the total high enough. In fact, a university student finishes his or her studies with a minimum personal debt of $40,000.
If a student meets his or her spouse at the university or college, and if that spouse has an equivalent debt, the debt of these two students who finish university and who have a diploma amounts to $80,000. I am talking about a debt of $40,000 for four years of study. A bachelor’s degree requires five years of study, which raises the debt to $50,000 per person and to $100,000 for two people.
Now, if the two students want to work and if they do not live in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver or Calgary where there are public transit services that enable them get around and to go to work, and if they live in a rural community, they will have to buy a car. And if they do not both work at the same place, two cars will be necessary. Let us suppose they buy used cars valued at $10,000 each. Then, the two students will have a debt of $120,000.
Even if they do not live in Toronto, where houses cost between $250,000 and $300,000, but rather in a rural area where the cost of living is not so high, they will still have to pay $80,000 more to buy a house. The couple will therefore have accumulated a debt of $200, 000 before even having their first baby. That is what we have done to the future generation. We have transferred Canada’s debt to our next generation, and that is a disgrace. That is what we have done.
At a time when Canadians are being told to tighten their belts in order to pay down the debt, who else has been affected by such a measure? It is working people, the unemployed and people who lost their jobs who have been affected.
When the Liberals were in power, the surplus in the employment insurance fund was about $7 billion a year. The debt was therefore paid down on the backs of men and women who had lost their jobs and who had families to support. Children attending school needed money, but the grants to help them were cut.
Even that was not enough for the Liberal government. In 2001, it said in regard to employment insurance that even if a citizen only made a technical error in filling out a statement, it would be considered fraud. For the Liberal government, it was really vague but all infractions were considered fraud. If a citizen forgets to declare a week’s work on his employment insurance statement, that is fraud. The citizen has to return the amount due to employment insurance, as well as penalties and interest. Not only is this the citizen’s own money, but he has to pay interest on it.
So who is paying down the debt?
When the Conservatives arrived, they did not do any better. If we look at the Conservative government’s last budget, there is absolutely nothing for employment insurance. The Conservatives said that they had already studied a possible program for older workers. What kind of program are they considering? They say that they are going to provide training. I can understand that this would be on a voluntary basis. But with all due respect for the Conservatives, are they really going to take someone who is 60 years old with a grade eight education and give that person a chance to go to school, reach grade 12 and then do four years of university in order to be able to work? It is nonsense. What kind of a program is this?
They missed the boat. Where I come from in Baie-des-Chaleurs, we see boats going past and sometimes say that someone missed the boat. That is what the government did.
However, the NDP, in the Liberal government's last budget, used Bill C-48 to get $1.5 billion to help students pay down their debts. We had to resort to force to get this allocation. The Liberal government did not want to fall and it accepted our offer. I think this is one of the first opposition party budgets that has been voted on in the House of Commons. I think I am not mistaken. How did they come up with this money? The Liberal government at the time wanted to give major corporations $10 billion in tax cuts. Of that money, we used $1.5 billion to reduce student debt, $1.6 billion to help people who needed housing, $900 million to help municipalities with their infrastructure, $500 million for foreign countries and $100 million to help workers when a company goes bankrupt and its employees lose their pension fund. The NDP was thinking about ordinary Canadians, who do their civic duty and go out and vote.
Nevertheless, who is responsible for this country's debt? It is certainly not the workers who get up in the morning, pack a lunch and spend the day working hard for a living. They did not create the debt. But when it came time to pay down the debt and balance the budget, this was done on the backs of the workers, the citizens, and older persons.
We had to put up another fight against the government to help our veterans with the veterans independence program for veterans of the Second World War, 1939-1945. We cannot even take care of these people. We have to use a piecemeal approach.
Nonetheless, when we look at today's federal government budget, after we promoted the idea of having strong child care services in the country and help working people have a national child care system, the Conservative government refused and decided instead to give $1,200 for every child under the age of six.
What have we done? Have we helped the system? I say no. I am not the only one; our party also says no. We are not the only ones who think this. I believe that nearly all parties say the same thing. The Bloc will say that this is a matter under provincial jurisdiction, and I respect this, but it believes in child care centres. Even our party, how many times have we talked about Quebec, and not because of the Bloc? We often use Quebec as an example, because its programs are genuinely progressive. That is why we want to implement its child care program throughout Canada. The Conservatives’ system, on the other hand, is modeled on the American system. It hands out money and tells people to look after their own problems. At the end of the day, has this helped children? Has it helped working women? I say that it has not helped them at all.
Once again, I say that we are missing the boat. This Conservative government presented a budget in the spring, and on September 25 it announced that it was making cuts, cuts that will do harm. When we see the cuts made to the court challenges program, we have to wonder.
Will the cuts to the court challenges program prevent people in the community from making their cases in court?
On that point, we have to talk about official languages. Minorities in Canada have used the court challenges program on more than one occasion. I will offer an example. The food inspectors in Shippagan who were transferred to Dieppe, New Brunswick, won their case because of the Court Challenges Program. One person acting alone would never have got the case to court.
In the riding of Acadie—Bathurst, where I come from, people in French-speaking areas were moved to Miramichi, where 70% of the population speaks English. Even the people of Miramichi said that it was crazy to move a community somewhere else. The communities were able to get their case to court because of the court challenges program. They won their case. That was the first time in the country that a legal challenge had been brought before a judge and accepted. This is now legal precedent in Canada.
We have to think about our minority communities, whether they are English-speaking or French-speaking. I do not believe that an individual could have fought that fight alone. It is unimaginable.
Let us look at the RCMP in New Brunswick, the only officially bilingual province in Canada. Once again, communities defended themselves in court and won their case. Indeed, from now on, the federal government must make bilingual officers available to the people of New Brunswick. They won their case. Imagine what happened next. It was not the Conservatives who challenged it; it was the so-called good Liberals, who are supposed to be perfect, who challenged it in the Court of Appeal. If the court challenges program had not existed, they could not have appeared in court and the debate would not have continued.
Now, the Conservatives are in power and, in my opinion, they are the same bunch, because they are here to defend capitalism and not the social aspect of anything. Nothing has changed. The Conservatives did not withdraw the appeal. The Conservative minister responsible for the file rose in this House to say that we cannot give money to Canadians so that they can fight in court those who legislate, that this did not make sense, that the government enacts good laws, and that they must be respected.
Yet, why were some of these court cases successful against the government?
In order to strike a balance, we should stipulate that, if a citizen wins his or her court case in the lower court, the government cannot launch an appeal with taxpayers' money. The government does use public money to appeal these cases. It should not be allowed to do so, since this upsets the balance between the two parties. There is absolutely no balance.
I was very sad to see what the Conservative government did to the court challenges program. It cut the program, which allowed citizens to challenge the government on its decisions and laws. By doing that, it has removed the tools of democracy. If the government is making the law, then the court will be paying for judges and lawyers, yet citizens cannot get the same money. They cannot be equal. The government uses taxpayer money to contest court judgments. It is a sad thing if we cannot have a balance and provide the tools to allow citizens to go to court and challenge the decisions or interpretations of laws of the government.
Look what was done to the Montfort Hospital in Ottawa. The hospital used money that was in the court challenges program. If it had not, the hospital would have closed. I challenge anybody today to say what happened with the Montfort Hospital was not right.
Who are the Conservatives to say that their laws are perfect? Who are the Conservatives to say that they follow the law? The Conservatives have said that nobody should be sitting in the Senate if the individual is not elected by the citizens of Canada, yet they appointed Michael Fortier to the Senate. They said that was okay because he was a good person so he did not have to be elected. They say that they do not believe in an unelected Senate, but Michael Fortier was appointed to the Senate, not elected. Twice the Conservatives broke their promise. They broke their promise on who should be in the Senate. Who are they to say that he is a good person when in a democracy, one has to be elected by the citizens of Canada.
We are not asking much. If someone is a minister, we believe that person should be elected by the people and answer to the people. We cannot even question the minister about the budget. He refuses to go to committee meetings.
