Mr. Speaker, I will pick it up from there. The main thing the last budget tells us is that the deficit has been reduced, and the government is to be congratulated for that. But it is overdoing it a bit for the government to claim that it has reduced the deficit by cleaning up public finances. We know very well that the government has not attained its objective, in terms of cutting its expenditures.
In fact, where it has indeed reduced the deficit by reducing certain expenditures is in two very specific areas. First of all, by cutting $4.5 billion, or $4,500 million, in transfer payments to the provinces, which will affect health, education and welfare in particular, or in other words areas which affect the most disadvantaged members of society. So, it took $4.5 billion from transfer payments to the provinces. Yet we remember the Prime Minister's commitments. We have them here in English. He stated this before the 1993 election, and I am quoting the Prime Minister here:
"What we said in our platform is we don't intend to reduce the transfer payments. What I said in the program, and I intend to keep my word, is we don't intend to cut further".
A few months later, in April 1994, the Minister of Finance set the record straight after the election, and I quote him, again in English:
"The next federal budget will include massive cuts in aid to the provinces for such things as health, welfare and education", according to the Toronto Star in April 1994.
So we can see that election promises are not worth much. They promised to make no cuts to the provinces, yet half of the deficit they are now claiming to have reduced comes from a $4.5 billion cut in transfer payments to the provinces.
Then, as well, $5 billion or $5,000 million, were taken from the unemployment insurance fund. Not the employment insurance fund, for there is no such thing as employment insurance, it is unemployment insurance. They laid their hands on $5 billion belonging strictly to the workers of this country. The government did a kind of collective garnishment of wages, and decided to reduce its deficit with that money.
So then, the Canadian government's deficit was not cut by a massive reduction in state spending, but by massive cuts in transfer payments to the provinces which in turn, be it Ontario, BC or Quebec, have been forced to make dramatic cuts to hospital services and health care. As my colleague from the Reform Party was saying this morning, this government is the one government in the history of Canada that has closed the greatest number of hospitals in the least amount of time, because all hospital closures are the direct result of the cuts to transfer payments to provinces made in the last budget.
I believe that some here do not understand how finances work.
An in-house report of the Department of Human Resources Development has revealed that today, 55 per cent of the unemployed no longer receive unemployment insurance benefits. Fifty-five per cent of the people who deserve to get these benefits no longer do, compared with 33 per cent when the Liberals came to power. I know some people will say we are making this up, but this is from a press release of the Canadian Labour Congress, dated January 23, 1997.
The CLC estimates that by the end of 1997-in other words, right after the election-when we will be able to see the impact of the Liberal reform, the proportion of unemployed who are not eligible for unemployment insurance benefits will easily exceed60 per cent, in other words, 60 per cent of those who expect to get unemployment insurance at the end of 1997, when all other measures have been put in place, will realize after the election that there is no unemployment insurance for them.
The Minister of Human Resources Development is nevertheless trying to sell this reform by claiming that 500,000 more people-they will say just about anything-will be covered by the employment insurance plan. At least, that is what he says. Now, about employment insurance. What the minister means is that 500,000 more people will pay unemployment insurance premiums.
However, an in-house study by the Department of Human Resources Development was published in 1996, and my colleague can check this, on employment insurance and the impact of reform. This comes straight from the minister. What the minister means and what this study claims is that more than 75 per cent of the new people who are supposedly covered-the 500,000 people referred to by the minister-will have their premiums refunded at the end of
the year because they did not earn more than $2,000; they will probably never get unemployment insurance.
Always according to the same study, only 18,000 more people in Quebec will be eligible for benefits, while at the same time, 31,000 current beneficiaries will be completely excluded from the plan as a result of the Liberal reform. This still according to the same information provided by the department.
Unfortunately, that is not the end of it. All persons who earn more than $2,000 annually but do not work the minimum number of hours required to qualify, which varies between 420 and 910 hours, will pay premiums which will not be refunded because they earned more than $2,000 during the year, and meanwhile they are not eligible for unemployment insurance if they lose their job.
This is easy to understand. There are people, for instance in universities, who teach about two or three hours per week. However, they are relatively well paid on an hourly basis because it is felt that they have a lot of course preparation to do. By the end of the year, they have earned more than $2,000, they have paid unemployment insurance premiums but did not work the total number of hours required, so they are not eligible for unemployment insurance. There are thousands of people in this position.
With the massive cuts in transfers to the provinces and the wholesale garnishment of wages, so to speak, to benefit the unemployment insurance fund, the government has deliberately created a network of poverty in this country. We have 500,000 more children living in poverty. Not three, four or one but 500,000 more than there were three and a half years ago. This government even has the nerve to tell us it has done a good job. I think the public will be in a position to judge in the next election.
I have a short quote taken from page 19 of the red book, before it disappears and they do everything they can to make it sink into oblivion, because they did not keep any of the major commitments they made in the book. So here is the quote:
A number of government programs and tax expenditures-some of which have been identified by the auditor general-are inefficient, poorly managed or driven for purely political reasons. We will clean up.
That is what it says on page 19 of the red book. What does cleaning up mean? There were the family trusts, which transferred $2 billion to the United States without paying a cent in taxes. They are most likely talking about the $400 million or $500 million in unpaid taxes. All that went on behind the scenes. There was no paper trail. The so-called ministers knew nothing, nobody wanted to investigate, the knuckles of the auditor general were rapped. He said, and I quote: "We fear that Revenue Canada, in making these decisions, has harmed the tax base by giving up its right to collect these amounts".
I remind you, Mr. Speaker, that $500 million, and I will close on this as I see my time is up, is what the Minister of Finance, his voice quavering, is trying to tell us he is going to give over five or six years to the poor children of Canada, who number 500,000 more than they did three and a half years ago.
All this time, however, the minister raises not a pinkie to stop someone who probably contributes to Liberal party coffers from leaving Canada with $500 million in unpaid taxes, which the children will have to pay some day. I am acutely chagrined by the fact that the minister continues to try to tell us that they reduced the deficit through proper management and improvement of public finances, because it is simply not true.