Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to participate this afternoon in the debate on Bill C-17, An Act to amend certain statutes to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on February 22, 1994. If we read the explanatory notes, we see that this bill deals with several issues and I would like to mention those that interest me the most, namely the wage freeze, the CBC, of course, and unemployment insurance. I will touch on these issues in my short speech.
This morning while listening to the debates because I was on today, I heard a member opposite give this bill 98 out of one hundred. I have the impression that we did not read the same bill. Although some sections are interesting-we cannot say, even if we are in opposition, that everything is bad-I would find it very hard to give such a high mark to this bill. True, when I was a teacher I had a reputation for giving low marks, but I still learned to read documents and assess their contents.
Wages are frozen for another two years. This time, they add insult to injury by suspending pay increment increases, which is worse as it will reduce even more the purchasing power of all public servants and all those targeted by this bill. I did not take any economics classes but, in my opinion, the more people's purchasing power is reduced, the slower the economy recovers. That is my impression, in any case.
So I do not see how this measure will put people back to work. The government is always talking about job creation. I would very much like to have, outside the Parliament buildings, a thermometer that would allow us to see every morning the number of jobs created by this government. We are used to red mercury, but we would probably see the thermometer dip to the freezing point quite often, without rising again because lost jobs would also be recorded. It would be hard to get the mercury to rise. The exercise could be extremely interesting, given how the government side crows over that project saying it will create 40,000 jobs. They want people to believe them, but they can never tell us how many jobs were really created the day before.
In my region, I hear people say: "Yes, three jobs were created, but yesterday eight jobs were lost. We are still five jobs short, even if we have three new jobs today." I think they should stop trying to convince people that so many jobs have been created. If there were that many new jobs, we would not have such high unemployment levels. This is self-evident, I would say.
With the wage and pay increment freeze, how will the pay equity problem which affects mainly women be resolved? Exceptional measures were adopted to provide for the Civilian Reduction Program. Here again, this could have been handled differently. We could have said: "O.K. We will freeze the pay increments and wages, but at the same time we will resolve the pay equity problem." That would have been a positive measure to take in order to revitalize the economy, since a good segment of the population would have regained some of its purchasing power, which it does not have because of a kind of discrimination that is allowed to go on in the federal system. By the way, the Quebec government was able to put an end to this kind of discrimination, thanks to the settlement it reached with the central labour bodies. In my mind, that would have been a very positive measure to take, but they blew it!
The first time I spoke on the budget, I mentioned that a lot of the workers in my riding have seasonal jobs. Fortunately for all of us and also for the Japanese it would seem, crab fishing has resumed. Some people will now leave the unemployment lines and get back to work. This will make the unemployment rate go up and down. And it is from these monthly figures, which do not reflect the true situation, at least from my point of view, that we are going to decide how many weeks of benefits people will be entitled to or what percentage they will receive, and so on.
So, we are using a measure which is arbitrary and sometimes far-fetched, because if you take the overall number of people fit for work who are between the age of 18 and 55 and compare this real number to the famous rate we hear about all the time, you would be quite surprised.
Now, daycare was mentioned in the red book. But, it was announced that no money would bet set aside in this year's budget for daycare. So, we were not to expect a miracle, because this party only does was it promised to do. Moreover, daycare subsidies were linked to the GDP. However, we do expect families to take care of their children, whether the GDP is rising or over 3 per cent. To my way of thinking, it is important that children be taken care of, whether the gross domestic product stands at 3 per cent, 2 per cent, or 1 per cent. It seems to me that, especially in this International Year of the Family, this shows a severe lack of vision and long-term planning on the part of the government.
So, when it comes to job creation, if we look at Heritage Canada, which is, as you know, my favourite department, we find that the budget of the National Film Board was reduced by $600,000. Why? To prevent independent directors from making movies. They create jobs but we cut there too. We heard this afternoon and yesterday about francophones outside Quebec. When we cut what is set aside for francophones outside Quebec by 5 per cent, we cut jobs. They cannot afford to keep their employees. Thanks to this measure, francophone organizations outside Quebec will undoubtedly disappear and very soon only anglophone members will represent Canada in this House. There will not be francophone members from Canada any more.
So, in my mind, this is also a serious problem. This department is always cutting jobs. In the case of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, this great agency which receives $1.2 or $1.3 billion yearly from the government, it has been known for a long time that CBC has a major problem, that is a structural loss of revenue.
In 1990, it was decided to cut the fat and to get rid of the regions so that CBC would have the dough it needed to solve its problems. Madam Speaker, the figures are astounding. This year, that is in 1993-94, CBC will have a $41 million deficit that will be covered by the staff pension fund surplus. Next year, the estimated $31 million deficit will be met the same way.
I can go on and on. In 1998-99, the deficit is going to reach $178 million. To top it all, CBC was just given authority to borrow $25 million in order to unfairly compete against private corporations and buy the broadcasting rights for the Atlanta Games at a cost of $28 million. Obviously, there is something wrong with that. This is a major problem. Assistance to athletes is cut, but we are going to support the Atlanta Games by paying two and a half times more for the broadcasting rights than CTV or Tele-Metropole were ready to pay.