Mr. Speaker, I shall continue in the same vein as my hon. colleague from Rosemont, on just how seriously our colleagues over there and next to us here are taking this budget, whether they are showing any real interest in criticizing it. This is a very serious matter, since it is so insidious and involves long term measures that will commit future governments, while not dealing well with the short term.
I shall continue, nevertheless, keeping those subtleties in mind.
The angles of attack-That, Mr. Speaker, may be the reaction of a man of the people to the silence from government members and Reform members.
It is certainly not for want of things to criticize about this budget. We could talk about old age pensions, as has already been done; about the government's intentions concerning the revenue commission-where not only is the federal government intervening in an area of jurisdiction which is provincial under the Constitution, but where it also wants to push aside the only province that stood its ground in this matter and respected the Constitution, namely Quebec. Now it wants to shove Quebec aside and take over everything in a Canadian context.
We could also criticize the way this government is dealing with the deficit. It is doing so at the expense of the least well-off members of society, that is the unemployed, by blithely dipping into the unemployment insurance fund to the tune of $6 billion yearly, a fund financed by workers' contributions. This is something that must not be lost sight of, something that must be mentioned again and again. Contributions come from employers and from employees. The cuts are being made at the expense of the provinces. They are blithely cutting transfer payments which ought normally to go to the provinces.
But my intervention will deal mainly with the systematic attacks against worker funds. Two important worker funds appealed directly to Quebec. The first one, the CSN fund, was created recently and has known an almost resounding success, if we consider that they had a rather short timeframe to set it up. The second one, the largest, is the Fonds de solidarité des travailleurs du Québec, the flag ship of Canadian worker funds. The latter represents a third of all worker fund assets in Canada.
The federal government is going after those worker funds on two levels: first by reducing the tax credit granted to taxpayers and funds from 20 per cent to 15 per cent, and secondly by lowering the maximum contribution allowed from $5,000 to $3,500 per person.
The Fonds de solidarité is a huge success on both the financial and business levels. Since it was established in 1983, it has succeeded in creating or preserving 38,000 jobs. This is not peanuts. The fund did much better than previous Canadian governments.
It funds various projets. In the riding of Trois-Rivières, which I represent, the Tripap mill has closed its doors, the old CPFC, Canadian Pacific Forest Products Limited, had closed down. It was revived thanks to the energetic efforts of the Fonds de solidarité and provides 450 jobs today.
The Fonds has taken action at Novabus; Biochem Pharma, a pharmaceutical company particularly active in AIDS research, and Shermag, in Sherbrooke. In the Laurentians, it has been involved with the Château Mont-Tremblant and its ski resort. In the Mauricie region, in the Prime Minister's riding of Saint-Maurice, the Fonds provided financial assistance last year to a factory known as Desavenn Sac Inc., which had taken over part of the market left by the former Twinpac factory, in Cap-de-la-Madeleine, which had manufactured industrial paper bags for sugar, flour and chemicals that were exported throughout North America.
We can see how vital the Fonds de solidarité is for Quebec's economy. I am all the more pleased as the opposition critic to see that the Fonds has adapted over the years. It is now setting up regional development funds. Sixteen will be set up shortly. One in the Mauricie region was set up last fall. These 16 regional funds will complement the main fund of the Fonds de solidarité. Some of them are called SOLIDE, that is local job development investment corporations; thirty had already been set up by the end of 1995, with the co-operation of the Union des municipalités régionales de comté throughout Quebec.
In addition, the Fonds de solidarité in fine tuning its activities set up specialty funds in the areas of health, biotechnology and high technology in order to meet borrowers' needs.
It is all the more upsetting to see attempts being made to undermine the actions of the Fonds de solidarité instead of further supporting them. The value of this fund was demonstrated by a study undertaken by Carleton University for the Canadian Labour Market and Productivity Centre. It was not done in Quebec, but by Carleton University, not far from here.
This study shows that the Canadian tax system recovers within three years its tax incentives for fund management. Therefore, there is no reason to try to undermine workers' funds, in particular the Fonds de solidarité. On the contrary there is every reason to encourage it. This is in contrast with the statements by our colleague, the member for Willowdale, and former chairman of the finance committee, as reported in an article published in the January 18 issue of the Soleil . It states that ``the chairman of the committee maintains that these funds are granted generous exemptions which warrant strict controls''.
This same attitude is observed in the industry committee, where it is claimed that what the workers funds "cost" the Canadian tax system-some ten millions dollars-should be reduced further, when everyone knows that this is a direct incentive for the economy of both Canada and Quebec.
It is also a direct social and economic commitment because we know their effect on job creation, tax revenues, unemployment insurance benefit reductions, as well as the importance of a job for a family in terms of consumption, quality of life, reduction of drug use, reduction of spousal abuse, and so on. We know what unemployment means, we know what a job means. People who are able to create or maintain jobs should be encouraged, not discouraged.
These measures are all the more alarming in the context where this kind of federal government's intervention is taking place, since the government was elected with the slogan "jobs, jobs, jobs". We will keep on reminding the government of it, this government that created 65,000 part-time jobs-that is for 6 to 12 months-since coming to office. It is still boasting about its infrastructure program, and it was elected with such a slogan.
In this budget there is no framework or incentive for private corporations to create jobs. It is a well-known fact that, these days, major corporations tend to make prohibitive, outrageous profits-it is particularly true for banks-while allowing mass layoffs. We must question the ethic of such a phenomenon.
I worked for the Quebec government, dealing with businesses in financial difficulty and I know they must consider the possibility of eventual mass layoffs. This is certainly quite logic. When a business is having a hard time, it must rationalize its operations and one possible solution is to layoff people. It is sad, but it is in the order of things.
But when profits reach such levels as they have recently in areas like the oil, telephone and banking industries, to name just a few, and when these industries still downsize and lay off people in numbers such as we have seen, for example at Bell Canada which plans to lay off 10,000 employees in Quebec, no doubt for very logical and justifiable corporate reasons, we must question such operations just as we must question the attitude of banks which make five billion dollar profits but, at the same time, do not hesitate to launch massive layoff plans.
In another context, while they say that solidarity funds and labour-sponsored funds are too expensive, they do tolerate unpaid income taxes amounting to $6 billion and seem to be totally insensitive to that. They should start with this type of operation, put investigators to the task if need be and collect all those unpaid taxes before they hit on good, competent people who are efficient at job creating, particularly those people from labour-sponsored funds such as the Fonds de solidarité des travailleurs du Québec.
As far as efforts are concerned, they require efforts on the part of the labour-sponsored funds, but they ask banks for a 65 million dollar effort over two years when these banks are reaping profits of $5 billion. Furthermore, according to present trends, it seems that these profits will be even higher next year. This $65 million contribution is almost equal to the total cost of labour-sponsored funds across Canada.
I must also add that this is happening in a context where the federal government's policies in the area of economic development, particularly regional economic development, are almost morally questionable. Consider the debate about the coast guard, the introduction of cost recovery measures in the coast guard without any impact studies. The government went ahead with only one thing in mind: to meet the goal it had set itself, that is to recover by March 31, 1997, the $20 million forecasted in its budget for aid to navigation.
It wants to recover $20 million out of $160 million by the year 2000, without considering the real profitability of it, the real impact on users of the St. Lawrence River, namely shipowners. What would happen if, after having done their calculations, they decided that, economically, the St. Lawrence River was no longer a good place to do business because costs outstripped profits? It would be catastrophic. This type of calculation should have been done by the federal government. Just imagine the impact on the ports of Montreal, of Quebec City and all the other harbours which I might call secondary along the St. Lawrence River, like those of Sorel, Trois-Rivières, Sept-Îles, Baie-Comeau and Chicoutimi on the Saguenay River.
This type of measure impacting directly on labour sponsored funds is part of another scheme which is just as much a dodging of responsibilities as the user fees for the coast guard are.
Personally, I am shocked by the government's attitude toward the Fonds de solidarité des travailleurs du Québec in particular because, for us, this fund demonstrates the ability of Quebecers to look after themselves, to be imaginative and capable of being creative. We will not let the federal government go in that direction for very long. And the Liberal Party of Canada will pay the price for it, especially in Quebec.