Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I would like to welcome you, Minister. It is always a pleasure to see you.
It is, however, curious to hear my colleague from the Liberal Party, Mr. McCallum, speak so intensely about the fiscal imbalance when in fact the members of this party never believed in its existence at the outset. We find ourselves facing a fiscal imbalance now because, in Mr. Martin's 1995 budget, transfers for post-secondary education, health and social assistance were cut drastically. Mr. Martin never wanted to reform equalization either. So this is a mantle that you are assuming rather late in the game. This is unfortunate because you were in fact, given the tremendous surpluses that you accumulated every year, in a very good position to remedy the problem.
That being said, Minister, we supported your budget for one reason exclusively and that was that it contained a solid commitment and process to correct the fiscal imbalance. In French and in English, correcting means removing all of the problems related to the fiscal imbalance.
You mentioned, among other things, the problem of post-secondary education and the issue of health care, which has not been resolved yet. Even with the September 2004 agreement, if we are to achieve the federal contribution of only 25 per cent for health care, some $1.5 billion, and this on a recurring basis, every year, is still missing.
As far as post-secondary education is concerned, we need $4.9 billion per year to remedy the fiscal imbalance. If we use the rule of ten for equalization and if we correct the many parameters, including property tax, by taking into consideration all renewable and non-renewable resources, we still require a further correction in the amount of $4 billion. Basically, we need between 10 and $12 billion per year to remedy the fiscal imbalance.
As you know, the Bloc Québécois has often discussed this issue. We must take steps to ensure that this amount is transferred in a form of tax points or tax sectors to the provinces to ensure that they have some independence and financial predictability and also to ensure, as was the case in 1964, that these tax points appear in the provinces' financial statements so that they in turn can fulfill their constitutional obligations.
Over the past two weeks or so, you have concerned me, not you alone, but also your Prime Minister, Mr. Harper. He said, about two weeks ago, that this issue was nearly dealt with, that there was very little work to be done because, with the health agreements — those are your exact words —, a lot of the work had been done. You yourself said, yesterday, when talking about equalization, that you did not exclude at all the possibility of removing all non-renewable natural resources. By doing this, you will not correct the fiscal imbalance. Hence, in the case of Quebec, for example, instead of increasing equalization payments by $1.9 billion per year, you would be reducing equalization payments by $872 million.
How can you reconcile the fact that, in your budget and throughout your election campaign, you made a commitment to correct the fiscal imbalance with the fact that, over the past few days, you have been trying to soften this correction by proposing a very partial method of correcting the problem?