Mr. Speaker, I sure liked the first part of his comments. I will certainly do my best to answer his question.
First, it is important to get the facts right. I know the hon. gentleman is an honourable and respected parliamentarian who never wants to get confused by misinformation. As we pointed out in the House today, the changeover in transfers in the province of Quebec for example only amounts to 3.1 per cent, not the vast figures used, but 3.1 per cent in 1996-97. It is a reduction of about $350 million, at most.
I want to underline the point I made during the course of my remarks because I know the hon. member takes this very seriously. That amount is far less than the reductions we are taking ourselves as a federal government, which is on average about 7 or 8 per cent. The national average of reduction on transfers is about 4.4 per cent and in Quebec alone it is 3.1 per cent. I would be quite happy to share further that information. It would be very useful for the member to know those are the real facts and not those that have been put forward by other sources.
It means we have to work at what I have heard the hon. member speak of quite eloquently in his own way. We need to eliminate a lot of the duplication which takes place between levels of government. We need to eliminate a lot of the build up of bureaucracies and the program administration which are in the way of the direct delivery of programs. I have always said that one of the major objectives we have in social reform is to eliminate many of those barriers and hurdles that have built up.
This puts the onus and responsibility on the provinces to figure out ways of doing that. They now have far more freedom and far more choice about how they can reorganize their programs to get those kinds of things because we are taking the restrictive rules off.
As the hon. member knows, the Canada assistance plan had a whole set of rules about what could not be done. A good example in Quebec is the APPORT program which has been a very good incentive to enable people on social assistance to go back to work. We could never fund APPORT under the old rules of the Canada assistance plan. Under our new transfer proposal Quebec can now use funds from the federal government for the APPORT program and therefore have a lot more flexibility.
It seems to be a real example of contradiction to have it being opposed by the Bloc Quebecois when it is in the interest of Quebec to have access to those funds for use in Quebec's own innovative programs.