Madam Speaker, I am glad to participate in the debate and appreciate the opportunity to speak.
This is not the first time I have stood on my feet and spoken in the House, but it is the first time since my election last year that I have had the opportunity to, perhaps in a little slightly more reflective way, thank my constituents for sending me here twice, in a byelection and now in a general election, and to say how proud I am to represent the constituency of Toronto Centre. It is a riding in which my father grew up. He went to Jarvis Collegiate, and then to the University of Toronto. Had it not been for a $250 scholarship that he received upon entry in 1932, he would not have been able to attend university.
I know many members opposite have called me many things, to which I take no particular objection. However, I am very proud of my constituency and of my association with the riding of Toronto Centre and I am very proud to represent it here today. It is a riding of enormous diversity. I know there are a great many people in the country who like to take some exception to Toronto and might have a certain, perhaps, picture or stereotype in their minds about it.
However, if I can describe it to members, my riding goes from the lake to north of Rosedale. It goes from the Don Valley Parkway, over to Yonge Street and makes a couple of other small jogs. I know many members of Parliament represent ridings that are 100, 200 and 500 square kilometres and mine is much smaller. However, it is an intensely diverse riding, where immigrants come. It is their first point of entry, their first point of staying. St. James Town has perhaps the most densely populated part of the country. Literally tens of thousands of people live within a square block. It was well known when the riding was known as Toronto—Rosedale. It includes some of the wealthiest parts of the country, in terms of its constituents. It also includes Regent Park which, as many members will know, is one of the oldest public housing developments in the country and includes some of the least well-off people in the country. We have a large aboriginal population. We have a large gay population. We represent the diversity of Canada and the diversity of the world. It is a constituency which I am very proud to represent.
As has already been referred to by some of the members who spoke earlier, this is not my first time in the House of Commons. I was first elected here in 1978, which is over 30 years ago. This is my 30-60 year in which I turn 60 and in which I celebrate my 30th anniversary of my election to the House of Commons. Next to my colleague, my seatmate, the member for Wascana, who was elected in 1974, I think I can speak with some confidence of some of the history that we have had here with respect to the country.
I want to speak about our budgets. I want to speak about Canada's recessions. I want to speak perhaps in a way that will disappoint some people because it will not be an intensely partisan speech. I want to try to reflect a bit on some of the challenges we face as a country and on the moment which we are dealing with this intense economic crisis and perhaps compare and contrast it with some of the challenges which we faced in the past. I am speaking from personal experience.
I was the finance critic of the New Democratic Party for three years and saw budgets come and go, the budget of the Conservatives and the budget of the Liberals at the time. It was a time when we were entering into a serious recession, in the late 1970s and 1980s.
I remind members, and in the case of many of the younger members I will tell them, that when Mr. Crosbie brought in his budget in 1979, that budget had a provision for a deficit of just over $7 billion. It was a budget that also called for an increase in the taxation on gasoline of some 18¢ a litre, and there are some colleagues who will remember the arguments about that and how that went forward.
That budget was defeated. It was then followed by an election, in which Liberals were elected, and then the recession took hold full bore and full steam. It was a very difficult recession. It was a recession that saw unemployment in some parts of the country go to over 20% and, in the case of the national average, we went well up over 11% and 12%.
It was a budget that was accompanied by a long national debate on the national energy program, which proved to be extremely divisive and difficult for the entire country, in which we saw oil prices literally collapse, which seemed to be, from the point of view of the consumer, a good thing and from the point of view of the producing provinces, a very difficult thing. We saw a recession, which in its general impact, was shared very much across the country.
By the time the Trudeau government was defeated by Mr. Mulroney, the last Liberal budget, which was brought in by the Hon. Marc Lalonde, contained a deficit of well over $40 billion. It was a time when people were really unsure as to whether these techniques of priming the pump would actually work, whether it would have the desired effect.
Under the Mulroney government, that deficit went down. There was a very quick transition out of the recession that took place in the province of Ontario, starting at around 1983 and 1984, something of which I am familiar because by that time I had shifted from the federal scene to the provincial scene. We saw a very steady increase in employment and in the health of the economy from 1984 to 1989 to the point where the Peterson government was able to introduce the first surplus, balanced budget in Ontario's history for over 25 years. There had been 25 years of deficits in Ontario and it had been steady deficits in Canada from the early 1970s until 1998.
Some of my colleagues may have read in the National Post that I have had opportunities to make a little fun of how I have somehow given up my title of being the deficit punching bag to my colleagues across the way. All I intended by that article, which I am glad to say struck a certain note with some people, is simply this. I know we went through a period when, as a country, we made a collective decision that deficits added upon deficits added upon deficits, regardless of whether the country was in recession, whether we were in growth or whether we were in a remarkable healthy state, was dangerous territory for the economy of Canada.
This is often not accepted as the fact, but the simple fact is all the premiers agreed in the early 1990s, regardless of political party. I can remember very vividly the conversation in which it took place. It was the night before our premiers' conference in 1992. Premiers were there from the New Democratic Party, the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. In an informal discussion before our normal first ministers meeting, we went over the ground on what we were facing in our economies. We had a very candid discussion about how challenging it was, how difficult it was, how hard the fiscal and financial situation that we faced in the early 1990s was, the impact it was having on all of our budgets and how we had a responsibility to deal with it, because in the long term, Canada would only be better off if we could manage our public finances in a better and healthier way.
We all made the moves that we had to make to get there, and they were painful moves. They were not easy. They were difficult. When Mr. Martin became the minister of finance in 1993, the first budget was not a tough one. The second budget was a tough one.
The 1995 budget, which really started the country on the way to a steady reduction in the deficit and to an improvement in our overall financial situation, was not simply the product of the political will of the Chrétien-Martin government. It was a product of prosperity and growth taking place.
I know that we all like to take credit for surpluses and we all like to allocate blame for deficits, but the simple fact of the matter is that it is the overall state of the economy that by and large determines where our fiscal and financial policy is headed. That is why I have taken no joy in saying to the government that I believe it has seriously underestimated, for a long period of time, the difficulties and the challenges which it is going to face and which any government is going to face in the face of the economic change we are going through.
One of the things that I learned in 1990, when I became premier, was that the estimates one gets from finance officials when things start going wrong usually underestimate just how wrong they are going. People usually overestimate the revenue numbers and usually underestimate the costs associated with a recession.
There is no magic here. As I look around the room I would say that what is happening is so clear that it is tragic to say we should have learned these lessons long ago. The revenue situation facing the Government of Canada and the provinces is going to get worse and the cost side is also going to get worse.
When I looked at the numbers the Minister of Finance presented in his economic statement in the fall, I found them absolutely unbelievable. Literally unbelievable. I could not believe that a Minister of Finance would produce that kind of a statement just as the world was heading into this maelstrom, this hurricane.
I am not claiming to be any kind of financial guru. If I were, I would be somewhat substantially better off than I am today.
I would say to hon. members that the recession which we are going through today is of a different character than the ones we went through in the 1980s and the 1990s. They were very difficult. Certainly, the one that was focused on Ontario in the early 1990s was very tough. Our unemployment rate went up from 5% to over 11%. We lost over 300,000 jobs in a 15-month period.
I hear the numbers coming out today, and I know exactly how bewildering these numbers can be sometimes. Statistics Canada gets it wrong, everybody gets it wrong. There is no obfuscation in this. There is no conspiracy anywhere. It is just recognizing that as human beings we do not have all the answers and we do not know exactly what is going on. What we do know is what we are facing today is even more serious than what was faced before.
I have often heard it said that a government cannot spend its way out of a recession. Actually, it really depends. It cannot do it on its own. I certainly discovered that as premier of Ontario. When facing high interest rates and cuts in federal transfers, to try to reflate from the base of one province does not work. It causes problems and challenges which we faced in Ontario.
On the other hand, what we are facing today and what we are seeing today is an unparalleled argument, not just from one government but from a whole series of governments, that something dramatic has to happen because of the credit crisis in which certain bad loans were allowed to be syndicated. Having been syndicated, they became a kind of virus which has infected the entire financial system. That is unparalleled.
There is no comparison to what we faced before. Interest rates are low, one can argue and debate this ad infinitum. The tax structure is imperfect and could readily be improved. There are serious problems with it. It is not acting contrary to the possibilities for growth and investment by and large in Canada anymore than it is in any other country.
Still we are facing the signs of a recession that is not coming quickly to a conclusion. I think it is fair enough to say that most financial experts, most economists, and indeed the head of the IMF believes very clearly that the worst is not yet over. There are still very difficult times to come.
I know the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance accused members of the opposition of taking pleasure in the terrible numbers. I want to assure him that is not the case. No rational person would, certainly not one representing a constituency like mine, and we all represent different constituencies where this is the case.
We all represent ridings where we can see the difficulties people are going through. We receive people in our constituency office. We can see the scope by the number of people in difficulty who consult us, because they are in very difficult circumstances.
Honestly, the government made a pretty remarkable about face. Is the budget perfect? No, I would not say so. Would my leader or a finance minister from the Liberal Party have presented such a budget? Absolutely not. Still, does this budget provide the basis for a discussion that allows us to send it to committee? Yes, in my opinion.
I do not think it is perfect. The document poses major problems for me. However, one would have to be totally ideological to say there had been no change of opinion or policy between the economic statement in November by the finance minister, a number of months ago, already, and the budget.
Now I am not an ideological person. I try not to be. I try to be practical. I do not like the Conservative government. I do not like Conservative ideology. I have never made any pretense that I have. Most of them do not like me, which is the way it is.
