Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be able to participate in the debate on the budget. I am certain 10 minutes will not be enough to cover all the ground I would like to cover. I will outline in point form some of the major concerns I have with it.
I have concerns about the fairness of the budget. I would like to debate at greater length the question of fairness with the member for Haldimand-Norfolk but I will not have the time to do that.
One of the reasons the budget has been received as well as it has is the fact that the government has given the impression there have been no tax increases. In many respects there were not the kind of tax increases that had been flagged prior to the budget. The trick, which is as old as the hills, is to get people worried about a bunch of measures and then when the measures are not included in the budget, people are relieved.
The fact is that Canadians will have to fork over more out of their own pockets in a variety of ways. It may not come through taxes but it will certainly come from having to spend more money on services that were previously provided by the government, whether it is in the form of user fees for national parks, decreased health care availability or whatever the case may be. We ought not to be under any illusion that Canadians got a free lunch out of the budget. Hardly.
I am concerned about a number of things in the budget. First and foremost in my mind and in the minds of my constituents is the privatization of the Canadian National Railway. This is something, given the location of the main repair shops of CNR in Transcona, in the riding of Winnipeg Transcona, that is of obvious concern.
It is a measure of how far to the ideological right this Parliament and the Liberal Party in particular have swung. We see the Liberal Party bringing in a measure to privatize the CNR which is something that previously would not only have been thought out of character for them but which goes against the promises many Liberal MPs and Liberal candidates made to railroaders in Winnipeg, and to Manitoba as a province, during the election of 1993.
Many people were under the illusion-I was not-in 1993, given some of the things that have been said by the hon. member for Winnipeg South Centre, the Minister of Human Resources Development, that if the Liberals were elected the bleeding of rail jobs away from Winnipeg toward Edmonton and other places would stop and that Winnipeg would be restored as a transportation hub.
The very opposite has happened. The Minister of Transport makes former Tory ministers of transport almost look like friends of railroaders with some of the things that he has said about railroaders and certainly the policies that he seems to be following.
The privatization of CN in the budget is just the final icing on the cake of the things that have been done to rail by the previous Tory government and now by this government. It is a betrayal of Liberal promises and Liberal policy. It shows just how ideologically bent the Liberals are and how, in spite of everything they said in opposition, once they got in government picked up where the Tories left off and accelerated what used to be known as the Mulroney agenda.
With respect to the Canada social transfer and the block funding of all social spending, again it is a total betrayal of the things the Liberal Party has stood for in opposition and previously in government.
Perhaps the Minister of Finance should have waited until May 8 to have given his budget. Then we could have celebrated the 50th anniversary of the end of the second world war and the end of post-war Canada the same day.
That is basically what the budget did. It declared an end to the kind of society we have been able to build up over the last five decades. It is no coincidence that the end to that era comes at a time when the NDP is severely weakened in Parliament.
The government has no pressure from the left, no criticism from the left, no opposition from the left, at least not the kind it used to have. It gets pushed to the right by my Reform colleagues here. The Bloc Quebecois is preoccupied with its own agenda.
The government and the right wing business Liberals who for so long have had to contend with a left wing contingent in their own party, and with the NDP on their left flank, now are having a heyday. The Minister of Finance is one of those right wing Liberals. He is having his heyday.
I do not know what the Prime Minister is doing. He is letting the Minister of Finance do whatever he likes. It does not matter how much it contravenes what the Liberals have said before.
I am particularly concerned about the effect this is going to have on health care. When does it end? When will the Minister of Health and the Prime Minister get up and say to Ralph Klein in Alberta that enough is enough, that the Canada Health Act is going to be enforced, that we are going to have national standards in the country, and that all this talk about enforcing the Canada Health Act flexibly and the other kinds of things that have been spoken about will come to an end.
It is not going to come to an end. It seems to me that the Liberals have decided that the Canada Health Act is passe and that in various ways they are going to allow it to fade away. They are going to permit provinces to experiment with the dismantling of medicare.
This is something I predicted in 1984 in my final speech on the Canada Health Act. I said that if the federal government was not going to sufficiently fund medicare, sooner or later there would be pressures both from the public, from provincial governments and then in turn from the federal government to dismantle medicare.
Medicare has to be adequately funded if it is going to succeed. That is an insight which in some ways others have brought to bear on this debate. It is not just a question of having national standards. One has to have national standards and appropriate funding. If there is not the appropriate funding, for one thing the federal government cannot withdraw that funding in order to enforce standards, and for another people become disillusioned about the health care system if they feel that in spite of the standards it is not the kind of health care system they expect.
With respect to the Crow benefit and its elimination, again it is another blow not just to railways, farmers and railroaders, it is another capitulation on the part of the government to the global opposition to anything that comes in the form of a subsidy. This ideology against subsidies and against taking into account the realities of a country like Canada is something that is very dangerous for us. In many respects, Canada was built along east-west lines against natural north-south forces. If we are going to cut all the things that bind us together east and west and if we are not going to take them into account any more, we are going to end up with an entirely different country.
Maybe that is what the government wants but that is certainly not what its members said in opposition. It is something that they should be held to account for by the Canadian public.
Even in the administration of the elimination of the Crow benefit, I hope the government will soon tell us how it intends to make absolutely sure that it is the producers who receive the money that is going out as compensation for the elimination of the Crow benefit and not landholders, as may well be the case given the current state of the legislation.
It is not enough for the government to say that the Farm Credit Corporation will make sure that producers get it. The government has to make sure that producers get it, no matter who they are, no matter who owns the land that they rent.
My final point is with respect to the deficit. I listened to my Reform colleague talk about the need to get a grip on the deficit and to take the deficit a lot more seriously than the government is doing.
What I would like to see both the Reform Party and the Liberal government take more seriously is the need to address the real causes of the deficit. In the judgment of NDP members, the real causes of the deficit go back to the tax loopholes which were created in the mid-1970s by a Liberal government and to the high real interest rate policy which has been followed in the country for the last 15 years. It is a combination of those tax loopholes and the high interest rate policy that has created the deficit.
It is not social spending. Social spending has not grown in the way which some have suggested. It has not been the cause of the deficit. It may well be that it will have to be part of the solution, in the sense that it is an obvious area to look at, how we spend the money and whether we could spend it more wisely. However, unless we deal with the high real interest rate policy, unless we deal with monetary policy, unless we deal with how we finance the debt, we are going to continue to have the problem. We will continue to pay out $50 billion in interest every year.
If the interest is the problem, let us look at the interest rate policy which creates the interest we have to pay. Let us look at the role of the Bank of Canada and ask if there are not ways in which it could finance a greater portion of the national debt than it does now in the way that it used to. Let us look at the way private banks have been allowed to print and lend money to the government, at a great profit to them and at a great expense to Canadians, without having to put up the appropriate deposits.