Mr. Speaker, the President of Treasury Board this morning tabled the Estimates of nearly $157 billion, of which $76 billion is earmarked for various transfer payments to individuals and the provinces primarily and nearly $48 billion will go to service the public debt, which is the government's largest budget item each year.
The minister said that deficit control, improved government ability to assess and react in time to new pressures exerted on Canadian society and support for a motivated and dynamic public service are the three main pillars underlying the 1996-97 Estimates.
Let us have a closer look at the merits of the minister's objectives and try to assess the means he will use to achieve them.
To control the deficit, they talk of controlling government expenditure through program review. What has come of these
program reviews? We should point out that all major regional development agencies are seriously affected in this time of high unemployment, when young people are leaving the regions for the cities.
There is, for example, the Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation, whose budget has been cut by 36.1 per cent; the Western economic diversification program, cut by 24.3 per cent, and the Federal Office of Regional Development-Quebec, the hardest hit by a budget cut of $102 million or 21.3 per cent of its total budget.
Meanwhile, the budget of the Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs has been increased by $6.3 million, an increase related to judges' salaries, allowances and pensions.
Although cut, defence spending still represents 21 per cent of direct program expenditures, excluding transfer programs. This is still far too much in a post cold war period.
The minister says we have to look and see whether, in the federal context, another level of government would be better placed to deliver a specific program more effectively. I would say to the minister that 11 years as councillor with the city of St. Lambert, a city in my riding, 13 years as a Quebec provincial official and two years here in this House as a federal elected representative have shown me very clearly that the closer a government is to the people, the more effectively it delivers a program and that the client approach the minister seems to favour requires the transfer of as many powers as possible to the provinces, the regions and the municipalities.
The increased control the government is preparing to exercise is what hurts the most. While it is talking about a client approach, the government is planning to create three new agencies, as mentioned this morning by the minister: a national parks board, a single food inspection agency and a national revenue commission that will be competing directly with Revenue Quebec, which already collects the GST and the QST on its territory.
There is a lack on consistency between the goals set by the minister and the means he intends to use to meet them. The government is talking about flexible arrangements with the provinces, but whenever it has a chance, it tries to centralize.
Similarly, we are told that, by the end of the 1998-99 fiscal period, the new measures brought about by this year's program review will allow the government to cut its program spending by $9 billion. However, the documents tabled yesterday in this House by the Minister of Finance clearly show that, due to the reallocation of funds to other programs, the net result of the program review will be a net increase of $34 million this year and a drop of barely $200 million next year, as the effect of this year's new measures will obviously be felt only in two or three years.
In short, cuts are badly targeted, reallocations are badly targeted, and, for the time being, these new measures have absolutely no impact on the fiscal situation.
To conclude, I would like to ask the minister how he thinks he will be able to rely on a motivated and dynamic civil service, when a more generous package is being offered to employees belonging to the unions with which the government has reached a settlement regarding the transition to a new structure, and when the Minister of Finance announced in yesterday's budget the possibility of more layoffs?