Mr. Speaker, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak on Bill C-100.
I feel obliged to say that this is yet another unfortunate federal initiative which, despite some slight impression that they are willing to help small business and create employment, is only intended, when it comes right down to it-at least in the eyes of a member from Quebec-to increase the powers of control and centralization over certain of the country's financial institutions.
The truth at the heart of the matter is that assigning powers to a superintendent of financial institutions under Bill C-100 increases his powers. It also allows Ottawa to take action more promptly when financial institutions are in difficulty, and here again, in the eyes of a member from Quebec, this is merely a move to increase the power in the hands of the federal government, since we in Quebec already have institutions in place which do the job and, what is more, do it very efficiently.
The Commission québécoise des valeurs mobilières is already in place and working very well. We have an inspector general of financial institutions who carries out the same duties Bill C-100 now wants to give to a superintendent at the federal level.
The game is therefore, of course, once again to beef up the federal government's power, the power of centralization, unfortunately at great cost, since once again there is overlap and duplication. Duplication is part and parcel of the history of Canada, the waste of having a federal department doing something, and a provincial department doing the same thing. There is a virtually endless list of examples of this fundamental problem of Canadian federalism, which essentially seems to me to want to monopolize powers in Ottawa, although there are already competent institutions on the provincial level.
This bill is, I repeat, not the sole example of this logic, or political attitude, within the federal government.
I could easily recall from memory some six or seven other bills brought before this House recently, since the election of the Liberal government. Without going into them in great detail, I could mention Bill C-52, which once attempts to add to federal power in areas that are not only under provincial jurisdiction but also concern the private sector. Then there is Bill C-95, which attempts to establish national health standards, often contrary to the interests and powers of the provincial governments.
We have C-96, which addresses human resources and also gives increased powers to the minister in applying the department's legislation. We have Bill C-91, which grants broader powers to the Federal Business Development Bank, we have Bill C-88 on interprovincial trade, which quite openly gives the federal government residual powers, including the power to intervene in agreements between the provinces. And there are many more examples. I could go on all day about this.
This government is quite simply intent on increasing its powers to guarantee a certain level of centralization and to keep the provinces well under control. We have this enormous deficit in Canada because the federal government in Ottawa has far too much power and, as a result, is wasting money left and right. It is the same old sad story of this country. As a system, Canadian federalism has been wasteful, and the federal government has failed to learn from its past mistakes. Even today, government members tell us, in speeches that are hypocritical and make no sense at all, that they are helping small business and will find ways to give them more money.
We are already doing the job in Quebec. We have agencies that are perfectly capable of meeting the requirements of small businesses. In Quebec, we have set up a number of creative initiatives to meet these requirements, in large municipalities and also in the regions. Our financial institutions work very well. We have all the resources and agencies we need to supervise these institutions. And it works.
So why bother today with Bill C-100, which would establish at the federal level a series of activities and institutions that already exist at the provincial level? Again, and we keep repeating this all the time, this is what is fundamentally wrong with the federal system. I could go on and on about the disease, as it were, that exists here in Ottawa, which is-perhaps unfortunately-not only due to a lack of political will on the part of the government but is reflected in the very survival of the whole bureaucracy established in Ottawa for so many years, which is very invasive and whose resistance to decentralizing powers to the provinces is ingrained, although across the country, people keep asking for decentralization.
The federal government has now tabled a bill that is a complete contradiction of these repeated requests for decentralization. The government cannot or will not listen. This is irresponsible, especially considering the deficit, which is cause for serious concern. It is extremely disturbing when a government tables bills like the one before the House today.
Bill C-100 is purely and simply another tiresome and costly duplication gimmick. In Quebec, we know what this means. We have problems with this, and perhaps this is one major reason for Quebec's wanting to leave and its wanting to change the way negotiations are conducted with the federal government. We want to negotiate as equals, because, it would seem that English Canada is unable to give the federal government a wake up call.
It will take Quebec's sovereignty to wake up the other provinces, and it will be in their best interests, because they will be able to reorganize themselves in more effective terms. When I talk of duplication and the costs of the waste it entails, we know what that means in Quebec. We have done a lot of studies on this. There have been commissions and studies, including the Bélanger-Campeau study in 1990, which gathered a lot of information. There was also the study by Mr. Fortin, a Quebec economist, who said that, in all, some $3 billion had been wasted due to federal and provincial duplication-and this was only as far as Quebec was concerned.
In other words, Quebec as a province could save some $3 billion if there were not this duplication. Three billion dollars; that is a lot of money. You will agree that $3 billion a year is a substantial amount. If the Government of Quebec had this money to create jobs, to lend it to small and medium businesses, jobs would be created.
It is time the government stopped kidding us about wanting to be more efficient and to create jobs, when, in fact, the only thing it wants to do is increase its power. There are examples of duplication. I tell you: all the latest studies show that Quebec alone is losing $3 billion. If we were to look only at the matters essential to Quebec's development, we could point, in the case of manpower training for example, to another study showing that, because of duplication between the federal and the provincial governments, Quebec loses $250 million a year. There is no training and the reason is that the federal government is trying to do the same job as the province. Often the federal government implements initiatives that run contrary to Quebec's interests.