moved:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should consider funding cultural organizations on a multi-year basis in order to promote their stability.
Mr. Speaker, Motion M-213 which I tabled and which was voted on deals with the funding of government organizations, particularly Telefilm Canada, the National Film Board and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. We know the dilemma of these organizations, which do not know what their budget will be from year to year. For a long time, they have been asking funding on a multi-year basis.
It is almost ridiculous to have to beg the government for this, especially because, when it was in the opposition, it had requested it, and, during the election campaign, it undertook to follow through with this in its red book. It had even defended the very existence of these organizations. Is is a known fact that the government drafts its budget for one year and that associations draft theirs for two or three years; it is therefore understandable that these organizations would want to enjoy the same rights and to have the opportunity to draft their budgets based on multi-year funding.
Therefore, this motion asks the government to thoroughly reflect on this today and to undertake to acquiesce to these organizations' request, that is, multi-year funding with a guarantee of no cuts.
Let me say that the motion tabled today was based on misgivings. Drafted last January, even before the cuts in the last federal budget were announced, the motion was based on the suspicion that the finance minister intended to deeply cut the budgets of national cultural organizations and mainly, as I said earlier, the CBC, Telefilm Canada and the National Film Board.
On February 27, a dark day for Canadians, we learned that the budgets of the CBC, Telefilm Canada and the National Film Board would be cut by 4, 4 and 5 per cent respectively in the next fiscal year.
In the case of the CBC, this means, according to various interpretations we received during the last months, a cut of $44 million in 1995-96. According to information given by Tony Manera, its former chairman, the CBC will lose $350 million during the next three years. This is no longer a weight loss diet, this is a shock treatment.
When he was appointed, Mr. Manera was promised a fixed budget for the coming years, after the dramatic cuts the CBC had gone through under the Conservatives.
We can see that things have a habit of never changing. Liberal policy is determined by the same senior officials or based on the same principles that private interests must be served before the national interests of Canadians. It is exactly the same policy. Yesterday, I sat on the finance committee where I asked experts if, not having known that there had been a change of government, they would have guessed, simply by comparing budget speeches concerning Bill C-76, that a new government was in office. These experts answered no, adding that the policies are exactly the same as those of the Conservatives.
In the end, there is no real policy change. The only difference is that the whiners that were sitting on this side are now across the way, behaving like a lot of sheep, as their predecessors did. The best example is the member for Prescott-Russell.