Madam Speaker, after studying the finance minister's budget I could just about give last year's speech. We are still on the debt and deficit treadmill and nothing much has changed.
The one good piece of news is that last weekend it seems that the Deputy Prime Minister went through some sort of fiscal conversion. I heard her on "Ottawa Inside Out". She said that a dollar invested by the private sector in jobs was a dollar going a lot further than one put into job creation by the government.
Most people in Canada instinctively know this is true. The Reform Party has been saying so at public meetings and in its election brochures since 1989. A dollar left in the hands of an investor, a business person, a consumer or a taxpayer will be much more productive in the economy than that same dollar in the hands of politicians.
The Deputy Prime Minister now realizes that the Liberal $6 billion infrastructure program was a complete waste of money. It did not create a single job, just like we told her. The Prime Minister's solutions of 30 years ago simply do not work.
Business has told the government how to create jobs: stop running deficits and reduce taxes. The resulting flow of money back into the hands of consumers and taxpayers will guarantee generous job creation from increased demand and new investment.
It is not really a hard concept to grasp. However, instead of doing what is required, the Minister of Finance has chosen to keep us on the treadmill of deficit and debt, exceeding $30 billion per year for the deficit and a debt which is now approaching $600 billion, with enormous interest payments of almost $50 billion per year on that debt.
In the time that it takes me to give this short speech the government will have overspent by another million dollars. As long as there is no swift action to really balance the budget and to begin running surpluses, taxes are certain to increase, the debt will continue to grow and interest payments will get larger.
It certainly does not take a rocket scientist to calculate that the cancer of interest payments will within a few short years completely consume our social programs and virtually wipe out every government service which is offered today.
Since the end of 1993 the Liberal government has added almost $90 billion to the national debt and, as a result, almost $10 billion in interest payments. That extra $10 billion per year has to be cut out of government services before we make one step forward in reducing the overall deficit.
Are sensible decisions being made about spending cuts? Absolutely not. There are major areas of waste not properly dealt with in the budget, such as the massive Indian affairs budget which is forecast to expand by 15 per cent over the next three years while services to other Canadians are being reduced by up to 70 per cent.
There is the excessive and unwanted spending on multiculturalism and grants to all manner of special interests and businesses. The government also fails to exhibit any will to control incremental spending waste, the little things that together add up to billions of dollars.
For example, a few days ago I received in the mail a certificate from the minister of heritage. It was beautifully printed, multiple colours with gold ribbon on it. It said: "Canada Day Certificate of Merit: Awarded to the Hon. Ted White in recognition of your contribution to Canada Day 1995". The award was signed by the minister of heritage. When I showed that certificate to a number of people in my riding I had comments like: "What sort of pea-brained, cerebrally challenged idiot would approve the expenditure of tax dollars on a certificate of merit to MPs for doing their job on Canada Day?"
I do not know who the pea-brained idiot was but the minister should have had enough common sense to put a stop to that project before it even started. The fact that she did not shows that she has a flagrant disregard for other people's money. It is certainly easy to spend it, is it not, when they just have to dip into the trough.
As a second example of incremental waste, a travel agent in my riding approached me and showed me the actual computer records of how taxpayers ended up spending much more than was necessary on a fare from Vancouver to Ottawa return.
A conscientious federal employee, knowing that a visit to Ottawa was coming up, approached a travel agent and requested the cheapest fare. The agent showed how a certain combination of fares would result in a total cost of $880. Instead of being pleased, the employee's supervisor instructed the employee to use Rider Travel here in Ottawa which subsequently issued a ticket costing $1,963, almost $1,100 more than that employee would have spent purchasing the ticket in North Vancouver.
Every MP gets letters and calls with examples of that type of waste but absolutely nothing is being done to control it. No wonder the voters have lost respect for the politicians. People see MPs as puffed up porkers slurping at the trough, handing out hard earned taxpayers' dollars to people who will not work, to special interest groups and to businesses that do not need and should not be getting the money.
Meanwhile the Minister of Finance is subjecting Canadians to the torture of a thousand small cuts. That is not the death of a thousand small cuts, but the torture of a thousand small cuts, nothing large enough to get us off the debt and deficit treadmill, but just enough to prevent an immediate fiscal crisis. Irritating little bits of pain for absolutely no gain. It is a course of action that will guarantee years of suffering and no measurable benefits for all of the action taken.
It represents a failure to learn from the experience of countries like New Zealand, provinces like Alberta and states like New Jersey, Massachusetts and Michigan which have shown that the more quickly the budget is balanced the faster the benefits accrue.
The man who was the Prime Minister of New Zealand during the debt crisis, the Hon. David Lange, who is roughly equivalent to an NDP type of prime minister, told me in 1994 that the only regret he had was that he had not moved faster to balance the budget. In hindsight he could see that the benefits would have accrued much more rapidly, shortening the adjustment period and creating jobs more quickly. Today the New Zealand economy is even in better condition that when I spoke about it last year. I used it as an example and I am pleased to update members.
The government sector is about 40 per cent of the size it was in 1984. The abolition of various marketing boards has allowed entrepreneurs to develop new products and markets. Income tax reductions approaching $23 per week for the average worker are being introduced in the next couple of months, and a further tax cut of the same size next year is promised, while the government continues to run large surpluses, paying down its national debt and increasing spending on social programs at the very same time.
Imagine how stimulative it would have been for the Canadian economy if the Minister of Finance had been running surpluses and yesterday had announced a $46 per week tax cut for Canadian workers. This could easily have been attained if the Minister of Finance had adopted Reform's zero in three program the day he came to office in 1993.
We would not today be talking about how to balance the budget. We would be arguing about how to spend the surpluses. With more money in their pockets Canadians would have spent more, increasing domestic demand which in turn would create jobs and increase government revenues.
In New Zealand and in Alberta revenues increased faster than expected after the budget was balanced, allowing spending on social programs to be increased, for example in New Zealand by almost $1 billion in one year.
It is also important to note that the 12 per cent unemployment rate in New Zealand is now down to 5.6 per cent. When did Canada last have a 5.6 per cent unemployment rate? Canada has proven government deficit spending kills jobs and it will continue to kill jobs as long as it stays on this track.
The failure of the Minister of Finance to decrease taxes in yesterday's budget guarantees that even more jobs will be killed. It also guarantees ongoing deficits and a crippling tax load for our children and our grandchildren.
