Mr. Speaker, I will note at the outset that I am sharing time with my colleague, the learned hon. member for Kitchener.
This latest federal budget confirms that we are well ahead of schedule in achieving the Prime Minister's goal of a balanced non-deficit budget before the year 2000. In 1993 we inherited a record $42 billion plus deficit budget from the Mulroney government. Since then we have been reducing the enormous deficit on a step by step basis with each of our annual budgets. This year the deficit will be down to $19 billion which is $5 billion ahead of our own favourable projections.
We have decided to stay the course in our goal of a balanced non-deficit budget, possibly attainable by 1999 now, and not to succumb to the pressures to undertake lavish federal spending programs.
What we have done, however, is invest in those key areas of vital concern to our economic future and our general well-being by maintaining our social contract with Canadians and our famed social security network which earlier generations of Canadians paid for with far higher taxes than their counterparts in the U.S. This means a stable national pension scheme with no reductions in benefits for those now in retirement. It also means upholding the integrity of medicare and, beyond that, also making significant new additions to take care of the disabled persons and to maintain and extend medical clinics and laboratories.
It also means new investment in advanced education and scientific research in medicine and engineering as the key boost to creating leading edge industries capable of competing successfully
in world markets and also to providing the long term, highly skilled professional jobs that go with that.
President Clinton in his second inaugural address on January 20 spoke about becoming an education president for the 21st century. The Prime Minister, in asserting a necessary federal government role of leadership in establishing national education and scientific standards on a competitive level with other post-industrial states, has moved to fill the gap in constitutional power created by uneven performance at the provincial level and different, sometimes mutually competing, provincial policies and programs.
The investment in pure research as the basis for long range, leading edge technological advances was the key to the German and Japanese economic recovery miracles post-war. We are making that same investment in advanced education and science now. As a result, we have in this new budget a very much strengthened and extended federal government program of support and financial aid for students and their families designed to provide a flow of high calibre professional and scientific graduates into new industries.
Taken as a whole, the budget demonstrates our commitment to fiscal integrity and to freeing Canadians from the burden of huge annual interest payments to foreign creditors. In this way we will be able to devote even more of our resources to much needed social and educational programs and to move at the same time, when the budget is balanced, to reducing taxation.
The new budget also has its direct implications for governmental structures and processes that go to the roots of federalism. The constraints on governmental spending in a period of fiscal integrity directed toward the goal of a balanced non-deficit federal budget mean that community decision making on major community projects that transcend any one level of government, federal or provincial, have to be made on a basis of co-operation and of common joint problem solving through mutuality and reciprocity of interests of the different governments.
The federal government and Quebec have for a number of years shared decision making over immigration with effective co-ordination of federal and provincial lawmaking.
Recent inspired initiatives by the Prime Minister and by the premier of British Columbia have been directed to human resources and to immigration. We have resolved, thereby, some longstanding intergovernmental differences.
Further agreements could follow in other areas like fisheries, for which the basis of co-operation has already been laid in several joint federal-provincial commissions for inquiry and study of long range goals. This highly pragmatic, empirical, problem oriented approach, proceeding on a step by step basis is the new co-operative federalism. It seems to be yielding concrete results in easing intergovernmental tensions and ending long festering differences. It is, in any case, a refreshing change from that old fashioned, essentially abstract, a priori approach to federalism that insisted on isolating problem solving into separate water tight compartments of lawmaking power, federal and provincial, with an absolute ban on the different levels of governments ever working together toward a common result.
In another, in its own way, unusual parallel development, the federal government has opened up the diplomatic processes of negotiations over Canadian complaints of non-compliance by the United States with the provisions of the Canada-U.S. Pacific salmon treaty of 1985, with its important conservation imperatives. It has opened it up to input from the main private stakeholders involved, the actual fisher people. The Canadian fisher people are having a series of meetings with their U.S. counterparts and feeding back their consensus and conclusions to the diplomatic negotiators on both sides.
This is the new pluralism which balances the new co-operative federalism. It is an application of a broadly inclusive participatory democracy which should see more informed and rational federal government expression of Canadian community interests in the fulfilment of our international law based treaty rights and duties.
The federal system, as we know it, thus continues to evolve, undergoing change through developing custom and convention as glosses on the Constitution as originally written. This is being achieved in concrete, substantial ways, in spite of the seeming failure of those rather abstract exercises in the dry light of reason, represented by the Meech Lake and Charlottetown projects of yesterday.
The latest federal budget, by establishing the fiscal parameters and necessary financial limits to federal government decision making, enjoins a new form of pragmatic, problem oriented federalism based on intergovernmental co-operation and shared decision making, federal, provincial and municipal; the new co-operative federalism.
Thus the debate in the House over the present budget makes its own very distinctive contribution to the new constitutional law in the making.
The budget with its ambitious, imaginative and innovative approach opens the way to new ideas in federalism and in the structures and processes of government.