Mr. Speaker, Bill-17 now being debated is an omnibus measure. It contains some good provisions of which we would approve, as well as
some harmless ones. However, this bill primarily targets the unemployed.
To decrease the budget allocated to unemployment, the bill proposes a reduction in benefits and an extension of the number of weeks of insurable employment required for benefit entitlement. This certainly represents the biggest part of the budget. This year, the cuts will total $750 million, next year, $2.5 billion, and the following year, another $2.5 billion, for a total of $5.5 billion taken from unemployed Canadians. On top of that, another $2 billion in cuts will be made to transfers to the poorest provinces, bringing the total to $7.5 billion. This was the crux the budget tabled last February, a budget which is totally ineffective given the present debt and unemployment levels in Canada. Not only is it ineffective or useless, it is also totally crazy, because we have a government that, just like the previous speaker, the hon. member for Ottawa Centre, is crazy to pretend that they are acting, when in fact they are doing absolutely nothing to deal with the debt and the unemployment situation. Not only are they refusing to do anything positive, but they are going after the unemployed, the disadvantaged, the poor, the weak, the women, the elderly, and that is crazy.
That goes to show the evil side of the current Liberal government that picks on the weak in our society. It clearly shows the total lack of imagination of the government when it comes to measures that could be introduced to straighten the situation our country is in. The government has got no backbone. There are a lot of concrete, fair and equitable measures it could introduce, but does not, because it does not have the guts to act.
Why pick on the poor and the unemployed like the government does in this budget, when we could ask healthy Canadian corporations to pay their fair share of taxes? Several thousand corporations have managed to stay healthy these last few years. And when I say several thousand, I refer to the 90,000 corporations that have paid no taxes at all in Canada over the past few years.
There are over 200 millionaires who paid less than $100 in taxes. These corporations and these individuals should at least pay their fair share, especially when the country is in the middle of a serious crisis, so serious in fact that it is attracting the attention of the International Monetary Fund. The IMF is about to intervene because the debt in Canada is getting out of control and the government is ineffective. In fact, the money markets have reacted very badly to this awful and sick budget. There is a whole series of concrete, fair and equitable measures that could but will not be introduced.
Let me give you other examples of how to take the fat out of government operations, and God knows there is a lot of fat to take out and the government is not doing anything about it. Duplication of federal and provincial services, what is usually called overlap, costs us an incredible amount of money. In Quebec alone, it is estimated that such duplication costs $1 billion because the province of Quebec is delivering the exact same services as the federal government. Not only is it an awful waste of money, it creates more problems. It delays the implementation of major programs.
Take, for instance, manpower training, an area where an estimated $250 million will be wasted. Not only are we wasting this money, we are not providing any training.
In Quebec, 70,000 jobs are available but people are not qualified enough to take them. Why? Because the Canadian government lacks efficiency and has no backbone. They do not want to move although the solutions are there; they prefer to take it out on the poor, the unemployed and the destitute. This is immoral and crazy. I could never be part of that Liberal government. I would be too ashamed to agree quietly to such proposals.
This government is not even liberal. It has inherited the Conservatives' spirit: it helps the rich get richer supposedly because the rich will create jobs. This very old conservative way of thinking has no basis whatsoever. I have nothing personally against the rich but, in a society like ours, I feel that corporations and wealthy citizens must pay their fair share like everybody else. The poor and the destitute should not be asked to pay for the government's mistakes or for the fact that Canadian corporations are not taxed enough.
This is a conservative way of thinking which borders on fascism, since fascism tends to widen the gap between the rich and the poor and creates a very unfair situation like the one we have in Canada today. That is what we see today: a lousy government which merely introduce bills on the back of the poor, the destitute and the unemployed, asking them to pay more, while the rich and the family trusts are well protected.
Here is another example. The Minister of Finance has a family trust. Apparently, it is worth $40 million. Others have family trusts too. Family trusts in Canada are said to hold $80 billion at least and maybe twice as much. This is money that is not taxed, that the government does not want to tax.
This government is crazy, because it is ignoring the Auditor General's recommendations. He said in his recent report that in the last three years, $5 billion was wasted by the federal government. We do not hear about it, but the government is going to take almost $5 billion from the pockets of the unemployed. It is forcing unemployed people onto welfare, putting more pressure on the provinces. It turns the unemployed into welfare recipients and it pretends that it is an aggressive measure. The government says that it wants us to move ahead with confidence, but I call that the Shawinigan Waltz: two steps forward, one step back, change direction, three steps back, one step forward. The government tries to solve the unemployment problem with an infrastructure program that will create temporary jobs for men, but it forgets about women and young people. Moreover, this make-work project will be implemented just after the government raised the UI premium rate from $3 to
$3.07. The finance minister himself said that cancelling this increase would create 40,000 jobs.
In conclusion, I will tell you that the Shawinigan Waltz dancers are having a ball. The government claims that it wants to create jobs, but it turns around and does all it can to keep that from happening or it implements very temporary, quite ineffective measures. I say no to Bill C-17. It must not pass.