Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the whip of the Reform Party I would like to advise the House that pursuant to Standing Order 43(2) our speakers on the motion will be dividing their time.
First my congratulations to the Bloc for introducing a motion that deals with trying to come to terms with the problems of money and lack of money in the country. We are $500 billion in debt. It is nice to see the opposition and the government taking these things seriously.
It reminds me a bit of the parable of the prodigal son who left home and wanted to take a share of his wealth with him. Here we have the Bloc wanting to ensure that the fiscal House of Canada is in order so there is sufficient wealth for them to take with them. I would remind the Bloc that the end of the parable was that he did have to come home, unfortunately without his wealth.
I do not think anybody has spoken louder on managing the government's money than the Reform Party. During the last election we produced a four-page flyer that showed how we were going to reduce the deficit to zero. If anybody was eliminating waste it was the Reform Party because, as I say, it was a four-page flyer. My hon. friends across the aisle with a 120-page red book could only get the deficit down to about 3 per cent of gross domestic product or $25 billion. When it comes to the elimination of waste, duplication and extra effort the Reform Party is the party to which one should be looking.
The problem does not lie in the elimination of duplication of government expenditures. The President of the Treasury Board has already said, and other speakers have said so this morning, that we have a public accounts committee that is chaired by a member of the opposition. They have every opportunity to look at the expenditures examined by the Auditor General. He has pointed out that we are losing money here, that we are wasting money there: $10 billion is being thrown down the drain by this department; $100 million is not being collected by the Department of National Revenue through loss of taxation on the GST as half a million people have not been filing their returns. These things have been pointed out to us.
The thing to remember is that the deficit is $43 billion or $45 billion according to the Minister of Finance. The total spending by the federal government on its administration, on its salaries, on its rent, on its desks, telephones, computers and whatever else it needs to manage the country is only $17 billion. If we eliminated the entire civil service and everything that goes with it our deficit would still be around $25 billion.
Therefore if the members of the Bloc Quebecois think they can resolve the waste and deficit problems of the government by narrowly defining the idea they can find enough money in waste and duplication, they only have to look at the numbers and that will tell them that unfortunately they will not find the answer in another committee that looks at the same problem again.
In chapter 5 of his report the Auditor General talks about the debt and the deficit and concern about where this country is going. If we want to find out where we are going, it is always best to look at where we have been. He produced some interesting graphs and charts in chapter 5 showing it was in 1975 that our deficit really started to balloon. It was our colleagues on the other side of the House who decided it was time to start spending money on social programs by the billions. It was then they introduced what they called the just society.
I talked about this earlier in the pre-budget debate. At that time I said that if taxpayers had been given the bill to pay for the just society rather than borrowing the money to pay for it, we would have told them we could not afford it and we would not have the problems we have today.
Between 1974 and 1976 spending on programs mushroomed to about 130 per cent of the money collected in tax revenues. By the time we added the interest on the debt being created our spending exceeded 155 per cent of government revenues. That is where the problems started and why we have these problems today. Unfortunately we have to squeeze the social spending we have created in order to be able to afford government in the country. Not only do we have to eliminate the fat from the waste and duplication in services but we have to take a look at how we
spend our money on social programs in order that we can afford to balance our budget.
The Minister of Human Resources Development has decided to strike a committee to look at how we are going to revamp social programs and unemployment insurance. Last year we spent $19 billion on unemployment insurance. That is almost 50 per cent of the current deficit.
I do not suggest for a moment that we should get rid of unemployment insurance but we have systemic unemployment in this country of around 7 per cent. That is now to be considered full employment; 7 per cent of workers do not have jobs because of the problems with the social programs that say we do not have enough incentives built into them for people to go to work.
Our neighbours to the south have a systemic unemployment rate of about 3 per cent lower than ours. Their cost of unemployment insurance as a percentage of their gross domestic product is significantly lower than ours. That is the way we are going to balance the budget. It is not going to be through trying to save a nickel here or find a dime there by creating another committee to find out how on earth we are going to balance the budget. The answer is not there; the answer lies in social programs.
When we produced our zero in three flyer last fall we said that about $3 billion to $4 billion could be saved by providing incentives for people to get back to work. By reducing the unemployment rate, we reduce the cost of unemployment insurance and create additional tax revenues from people who are now working. That is where we are going to find the answers to our problems.
We said last fall that we should talk about eliminating old age security to families that earn more than $54,000 a year. It would save another $3 billion. We could save between $4 billion in UI and $3 billion on old age security, which comes to $7 billion. That is 40 per cent of total government expenditures we can save by looking at these two programs without having to go through every nickel and dime and line by line of the entire government expenditures. We identified $7 billion with these two programs alone.
Last fall when I was knocking on doors and talking to senior citizens in my riding they were concerned about our policy on old age security. For those families which make more than $54,000 a year, we are going to cut it off. Why should young families which are trying to get ahead have to pay taxes so that the rich can use their old age security to go to places in the sun in the winter? Many of the seniors I talked to said: "I wish we had seen $54,000 in our lives. My goodness, cut that off. By all means cut that off. We support you 100 per cent if we are going to balance the budget". Those are the types of things that my colleagues from the Bloc should be proposing in the motion.
The motion they have proposed today is far too narrow. The budget cannot be balanced if we focus on one thing. I know they have their own political agenda that says: "Put the blame on the federal government and that way we do not have to worry about what happens in the province of Quebec".
I am concerned about all of Canada not just the province of Alberta. I am concerned about Canadians who live in the province of Quebec. Everybody who lives in the province of Quebec as far as I am concerned is a Canadian and participates fully in this great nation of ours.
As I mentioned we laid out a full program on how to balance a budget last fall. We did it as volunteers. We did it as Canadians who wanted to make a contribution to the country. That is where we should be looking to resolve our problems rather than this narrowly defined motion as proposed.