Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to discuss this issue and talk about whether 3 per cent of GDP is a valid target for the government to be aiming at in two year's time and whether that is going to restore the confidence investors need before they will continue to leave their money in this country. There all kinds of implications that flow from that.
I want to talk a little about some of the wants and desires of Canadians. I think when we design a program, when we put together a government we have to give some consideration to what Canadians want and need. If we listen to them they say things that are really just common sense.
As taxpayers, Canadians want to keep their income. They want to have lots of disposable income and they work hard every day to try and grind out a living so they have some money for their family and so that they can retire some day, or if there is an emergency they can draw on some savings. That is what they want.
As investors they want to be able to get a good return and also protect their capital. They do not want to see their capital jeopardized. As people who some day may have to rely on a social safety net, they want to know that it will be there and that it will be adequate, that it will be something they can count on.
As parents Canadians want to be able to know that there will always be a university there so that they can send their children. They want to know that there will be some kind of safety net in place for them as they move into their senior years. They want to know that there will be a health care system there for their children. Those are some of the desires and wants that I think government has an obligation to try to meet.
It is not necessary for government to be in conflict with those wants and desires. A responsible government must align itself with those wants and desires and come up with ways of accommodating those wants and desires. To me it is obvious that there are ways we can do that.
Reform presented a perfect example of that this morning. I would argue that this government has not got itself in line with Canadians' wants and desires. I would argue that Canadians are moving completely against that.
A situation in which the government's best effort adds $100 billion to the debt and leaves us with a $25 billion deficit at the
very top of the business cycle in a couple of years, combined with the desires that I have just mentioned, creates in my judgment a very explosive situation. On the one hand we have the wants and desires of Canadians and on the other hand we have a government that in my judgment has created a business environment that is completely contrary to that.
Let me go back through the different hats people wear in their lives and talk about how their wants and desires are really in conflict with the disincentives that the government puts in their way to prevent them from achieving some of the things that they want to achieve and from getting the type of government that not only do they want but that they deserve.
As taxpayers they work hard every day to try to make a living and provide for their families. Look at what massive government debt does to them. It imposes a fantastic tax burden.
In 1963, if I remember correctly, taxes constituted about 20 per cent or a little over that of where people's income went to. People worked hard and all that hard work and effort was a tremendous positive force pushing up and providing jobs and prosperity for the country. Then we had that 20 per cent of taxes pushing down a little but not nearly enough to stop the desires and incentives that people had to create some prosperity for themselves and their families.
As the years have gone on we have seen more taxes piled on top of that positive force and now it is very difficult for that force to push up anymore. That is why a lot of people are giving up on Canada and giving up on staying in the working world. That is why we see people fleeing to the United States and other lower tax jurisdictions, particularly people who are highly skilled.
Other disincentives are the perverse incentives that are a big part of a lot of social programs today, social programs that actually pay people to remain idle. People who are responsible, work hard, want to provide for their families and work long hours every week see this. They ask themselves: "Why am I knocking myself out when the next guy over does not care and he is just laying on the system?". There is a real inequality in the system. We have a lot of disincentives now piling up on top of all those desires and wants of Canadians. It is beginning to push them down and they are getting tired.
As investors they expect to make a good return on their money but they also expect that their capital should be protected. We have been sent a message in the last seven days that investments in this country are in jeopardy to some degree because the government has not been able to get a handle on its overspending.
Now the international community is wondering whether Canada is a place where it should be putting its money. The same applies to domestic investors who have lots of options other than their own country.
I saw in the Globe and Mail the other day a very scary graph that showed how indebted Canada is to foreign investors compared with other countries around the world. It was frightening. We have a foreign debt load twice what the next country in the world has. I found it frightening to know that we are so tied to the whim of foreign investors because successive governments have not been able to get a handle on spending.
Now we have a situation in which this government is proposing to add another $100 billion to our overall debt load before we get down to $25 billion. That is its target and it is ridiculous.
International investors have to deal with that, as do domestic investors. Although they want to invest in this country there are a lot of disincentives and a lot of pressure pushing the other way to prevent them from doing that and to dissuade them.
As people who want to invest and want to have confidence in our social programs they are very concerned as well. In spite of the fact that we spend $150 billion a year on social programs we still have all kinds of unemployment. HRD's own studies show that social programs are contributing to unemployment, including the unemployment insurance program. In many cases we have people living at the bottom echelons of society with no hope, not because there is not a safety net there but because they are trapped in the safety net.
I think it is crazy that in a country this prosperous relative to the rest of the world where we spend $150 billion a year on social programs we have people trapped with no hope in our social programs. Something must be done to help them out of that situation.
This morning I believe that Reform came up with some alternatives that will get people out of that situation, give them some hope and give them some of the positive incentives they so desperately want to be in alignment with Canadians' wants and desires.
People in the bottom echelons of society are as desperate as anyone else to see their dreams and hopes realized. However, this government and successive governments have placed all kinds of disincentives in their way to prevent that.
The government has set no date for the elimination of the deficit. The best it can do is come up with a point two years down the road from now where it will reduce the deficit to $25 billion. It refers to its rolling two-year targets, whatever that means. Maybe it is like a moving target, one it does not want to hit and can keep moving it.
Very often the government says it does not know what the future holds so there is no point in setting a date when it will eliminate the deficit or when it will balance the budget. It is true that we do not know what the future holds but it is ludicrous for the Government of Canada to say that it does not know what the future holds and therefore is not going to set a date for when it can eliminate the deficit. That is crazy. It is almost criminally
negligent when one considers how many people's lives depend on what that government decides.
It is a little like telling people who are saving for their own retirement: "Yes, you should save some money but it does not matter how much because we do not know what the future holds. Perhaps somewhere down the road you will win the lottery or you will inherit a bunch of money so don't worry about it". It is the same mentality that the government is applying.
I fear very much for Canadians if we are going to take this situation so lightly that the government, in spite of what international investors have been telling us even this week, is going to say it does not matter, it does not know what the future holds and therefore it is not going to set any targets. I think it is absolutely crazy. The government must wake up for the benefit of all Canadians and acknowledge that it has to set a hard target and take some tough action right now so that it can move toward it.
What Canadians really want is a government that is absolutely in line with their wants and needs. They want programs that encourage their deep desire to be self-reliant, not programs that work against it. They want an economy that rewards their work, not punishes them. They want a government that gets out of their face, not like this one which seems to have to have a finger in every aspect of their lives. The government has been absolutely without a single success that I can think of, in terms of really helping people over the long haul. I will talk about that in more detail in a moment.
Canadians want a federal government that recognizes its severe limitations. A federal government in a country this size that is so far removed from ordinary Canadians has tremendous limitations. That needs to be understood. The federal government has to allow lower levels of government, families, charities, communities and obviously, individuals themselves to take more responsibility for their lives and to empower people to do things for themselves and give them some of the hope that they truly need.
I want to talk a bit about some of the areas where government has failed dramatically and compare them with areas where individuals have absolutely succeeded.
The first example I want to use is the Canada pension plan, and I will throw in old age security for good measure. I want to compare it with how RRSPs have done, a program that Canadians fund themselves and they are joining in ever greater numbers. In fact, I saw in the newspaper today that there has been a tremendous rise in the number of people who have gone to get bank loans so they can buy RRSPs.
When the Canada pension plan was established it was done so with the belief that it would sustain people in their old age. I do not think there is anyone in the country, and probably not even anyone in all parties in this House, who believes that is going to happen. Everyone knows the Canada pension plan is woefully underfunded. It is about $510 billion in the hole, if you compare it with other actuarially sound pension plans.
Old age security started out as being a funded program. However, that was abandoned and now it comes out of general revenues. People understand that as the debt gets bigger, the amount of money that can go into OAS and other social programs is rapidly diminishing. Most people realize now, even if they did not a year ago, that they cannot rely on government programs.
More and more people are starting to set aside money for themselves. That is why we see RRSPs growing tremendously. It is not a revelation to me that people believe they can save better for their own future than the government can. People all along have had more faith in themselves than in the government when it comes to these types of programs. However, it is only now, when the fiscal situation has become so acute, that people are taking this situation very seriously. They are scrutinizing how the government spends money and scrutinizing the form social programs take.
If we ask people to compare which is more successful today, the Canada pension plan or RRSPs, people are going to say absolutely that RRSPs are much more successful. They know their RRSPs will be there and that the Canada pension plan has eroded over the years.
I am going to get off the fiscal topic for a moment to talk about another area which is indirectly related to social programs and in which the same principle applies.
The other day the minister of multiculturalism said that Canada has no Canadian heritage. I thought that was curious, but then I thought about it and I think I understand what she was saying. For 20-some years or maybe a little longer than that, the government has tried to cobble together an official heritage, some kind of an official culture for this country. It has failed miserably and I think the minister of multiculturalism truly realized that.
Concurrent with that, there is a tremendous rise in Canada in the number of people who are going back to look at their own history. They are going through history books trying to figure out where their ancestors came from, where they lived in this country, and from which countries they originated.
People are very interested in the heritage of this country, but there is a big difference in how the government or the minister defines it and how people define it. People are very proud of their personal histories. All that taken together gives us a very proud heritage in this country.
We could even expand on that a little bit. In many cases, people are very proud of their communities. I come from a small community in Alberta. People there take a tremendous amount of pride in some of the local sites. What they really do not get very excited about are programs like official multiculturalism. They see that as something the government created a long time ago, not in response to their concerns but it was something the government felt it should do, that it knew better than Canadians did of what constituted real culture.
The comments of the minister of multiculturalism from a few days ago indicate that those types of top down programs have completely and utterly failed. The victims were the taxpayers who had to pay billions of dollars for those types of programs to keep them going.
Let us not continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. Let us not continue to have top down government in our social programs when we have shown over and over again that Canadians are more than capable of standing on their own feet. If they are given the tools, they are empowered to do so.
I want to talk about Reform's approach to empowering individual Canadians. We spoke this morning about a new approach to handling social programs. The member for Calgary North is sitting beside me. I applaud her and members of her committee for the tremendous amount of work they did in going out to really listen to Canadians and to come up with an alternative approach to Canada's social programs and safety nets, one that is really in alignment with Canadians' wants and desires.
Reform talked a little today about how we can empower the different groups of people who make up our country. We talked about empowering seniors, how we need to focus OAS and the guaranteed income supplement on people who are most in need.
This country is in tremendous financial difficulty. We have a debt that is over $550 billion. Just about everybody realizes we are going to have to target our social programs to people who actually need them. That is what we have proposed in our document this morning.
We are going to eliminate mandatory retirement so that those who choose to work beyond 65 can continue to do so. There was an article in the Ottawa Citizen today that talked about the high suicide rate among seniors once they are forced to quit at age 65.
We are not saying that you have to keep working. We are not saying that at all. We are saying that if people want to, they can continue to work. Many people have a tremendous amount of potential and ability to still give to society when they hit 65 years. Of course people are living longer now. We see elderly MPs who make a tremendous contribution to the House. We should not write people off because they have come to an arbitrary point set some years ago. Let us make sure that people, if they want to, can continue to fulfil their aspirations.
We want to give this country long term tax relief which will help seniors and all Canadians. Seniors are just as hard hit as anybody by high taxes. We have to move away from a government and a system that really does encourage growth in taxes. To do that, we need some accountability in the system. Maybe that could be a discussion for another day.
Of course, we have talked about our registered personal security plans. That is something we can talk about in more detail when we have some time.
We have talked about empowering families, strengthening the capacity of families to care for themselves and their dependants with tax relief and tax reform. We would like to see child care assistance come in a neutral form so that people themselves can decide what kind of child care they want.
I want to make a strong point. We are calling for a national registry so that people who have dodged their obligations to their families, those who are supposed to be making child support payments but have somehow dodged them will be eventually tracked down and forced to pay up.
I am proud to say that my office has helped track down a lot of deadbeat spouses. Eventually these people have had to pay up. They have to pay the money back to their children through their ex-spouses.
The government has really not moved quickly enough in this area, although it has been in power for about 16 months. We very strongly advocate having a meeting with the provinces to work with them to put that registry in place. It is absolutely critical. Hundreds of millions of dollars out there are not getting to the children who really need the money. We are going to push very hard for that.
As we have mentioned before, we do have our RPS plan which we are going to consult with Canadians on and hopefully, eventually put into place. It would be a way to give some power back to families and allow them to provide for themselves.
We want to empower the unemployed and the job creators. I want to talk a little bit about the five-R jobs plan Reform has come up with. It is radically different from what the government has proposed in its infrastructure program.
We are proposing to reduce and eliminate the federal debt and deficit. We are proposing to relieve Canadians of their oppressive tax burden. We are proposing to restore labour market
efficiency and reduce social program dependency. We wish to remove barriers to internal and external trade. We want to renew Canada's physical and intellectual infrastructure. Those are the five steps we would take to get Canadians back to work.
We could talk for a long time about these issues, but I know my time is up. I encourage the government to move quickly to establish a point at which it will reduce the deficit to zero and balance the budget.