Mr. Speaker, this reminds me of my first day of return to the House. I sat here and said to myself “I am surrounded, surrounded by Progressive Conservatives”. What a contrast with the last legislature.
We are very happy to be back in this legislature and in this Parliament and to find the voice we had lost in the last few years.
Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like offer you my heartiest congratulations, not only on my behalf but also on behalf of my caucus, the Progressive-Conservative Party. I also want to assure you once again of our co-operation in the performance of your duties, which hold such importance for the operation of the House.
I would also like to congratulate the leaders of the other parties who were re-elected in their ridings and who will have the opportunity to cross swords with all the members in this Parliament.
I would also like to congratulate all those who were elected or re-elected, especially the new members who are here for the first time and who are about to experience something extraordinary.
I would be remiss if I did not seize this opportunity to thank, from the bottom of my heart, the constituents of Sherbrooke, Fleurimont and Lennoxville who have re-elected me for the fourth time. I must tell you I owe these people a great deal. They are remarkable. I have had the privilege of representing them for many years now. I am trying—with some success, I believe—to give a true picture of what they are; they in turn illustrate quite well what I represent.
To those people I want to reiterate my sincerest thanks and I want to confirm that I intend to serve them with the utmost dedication and energy.
An election campaign is a moment for the country to stop, to reflect, to look back and hopefully to look forward. The last election campaign was an opportunity to do that. For me and for my party the last three and a half or four years have been very much about learning more about Canada, about exploring our possibilities and about going forward.
In the last two years and during the election campaign a number of things struck me about our country that are worth repeating today. Beyond the walls of this Parliament, beyond partisanship, beyond the rhetoric, there are a lot of good things to speak about in this country. There always was, by the way.
I want to take a second—and it may sound unusual to some members—to speak about our successes as a country in dealing with our deficits and debts.
A very powerful consensus exists in Canada for governments to balance their books and get their priorities right. There is so much consensus that we find New Democrats in Saskatchewan, Liberals in the Atlantic provinces, the Parti québècois in Quebec City and even, who would have thought, the federal Liberal Party of Canada have come around to the idea that we have to actually balance our books.
No matter how much they would like to redo history and say that everything was the fault of the previous government, that they had nothing to do with it, little do they mention, because their memory is selective, that they left behind when we came to government in 1984 a debt that had increased 1,000 per cent fold under the leadership of the Liberal government, including this Prime Minister. Their memory is so selective.
This is also a country that has done very well in the area of trade. Thank God we had trade agreements. Thank God we fought and won the election of 1988 and had the free trade agreement that allowed this country to increase merchandise export trade to the United States by 100 per cent.
We fought and signed the North American free trade agreement. Do they remember that the same people who now sit on the government benches fought us tooth and nail on the free trade agreement? What do we have today? We have a Prime Minister bent on travelling outside the country to increase trade with new countries.
He is now bragging about his new amigos in Chile. He wants to sign deals with Argentina. He wants to sign deals with Israel. He cannot get enough of it. Yet they fought us every inch of the way.
The good news is that had it not been for these trade agreements that we signed, that we fought for, Canada would have had no growth in its economy. Our domestic economy has been on its back for the last four years. Canada's domestic economy under the leadership of this Prime Minister has been on its back. We would have been in a recession had it not been for the trade agreements which we signed and fought for in 1988 and 1993.
You have to appreciate the spectacle of the Prime Minister and the Liberal benches rising during question period to applaud the government on its brilliant record. Here is a government whose record will say that it has governed over the longest period of high unemployment in Canada, the 82nd month in a row of unemployment above 9 per cent, since the depression of the thirties. That is the record they were applauding this afternoon.
What is the record they are applauding? There are more poor children today in Canada than there were when this government was elected. What is the record of the Liberal government that its members all applauded? It is the record of a government that has left Canadians poorer today than they were in 1993.
The income of Canadians has gone down 1.3 per cent. Yet if we follow the reaction from the government benches, if we watch them as they get up and speak, if we listen to the Minister of Finance or even the Prime Minister, they will quote the numbers from the OECD “We are doing better than this country and that country”. Maybe they should travel to Atlantic Canada. Maybe they should stay out of the OECD a little more, move away from Paris and Sweden or the Norwegian countries.
If they spent a little more time in Atlantic Canada and in western Canada they might find out why so few Canadians rise to applaud them when they speak of their record.
This is also a country that saw its health care and social spending slashed unilaterally, without consultation. This was unprecedented: a 40 per cent cut in funding. Was there any consultation?
By the way, where was all the talk of partnership back then, this great notion of rediscovered partnership?
During the election campaign the Liberals had to back down on health care because the health care system in this country is broken. The health care system in this country is suffering. The health care system in this country is threatened. It is threatened because of the actions of this government and this Prime Minister and failed leadership. They are going to be held accountable in this Parliament for having done that.
The Speech from the Throne was the opportunity for the government to say to Canadians what it is about this new century, this new era that it cares about, that it wants to focus on. In fact, you will remember, Mr. Speaker, that we have had an election campaign—it was a first, a precedent, as far as I know—to allow the Prime Minister to write the Speech from the Throne. “I need the whole summer”, he said. Why did the Prime Minister go to the polls three years into the mandate? Because he needed to write a Speech from the Throne. I do not know who wrote the Speech from the Throne, but I hope he was paid by the word and not the idea.
We could have expected a Canadian agenda. What did we get instead? The usual expressions of goodwill. How many times can we rediscover youth unemployment? Guess what, there are young Canadians out of work. Gee, why did we not think of that before? Speech after speech, and budget after budget gives us these useless, meaningless words, backed up by absolutely nothing, except a measure announced a few days ago, $90 million for an internship program for 3,000 young Canadians.
About half a million young Canadians are out of work. I think it is more than 400,000. If a person has a young boy or girl out of work today, that person can tell them there is hope. At this rate in 136 years the Liberal government will actually help them find an internship. That is the great initiative of this Liberal government.
We expected the government to at least heed the message of the election campaign, to say “We have got it. We understand. We heard.” There were many messages sent in the campaign. One of them at least the Prime Minister and I would agree on. He certainly did not return with the majority that he was hoping for. He certainly did not return with the vast support from all of the regions of the country.
If there is one thing the Prime Minister and the Liberal government must have understood, it is that they definitely did not get the mandate that they were hoping for and that they talked so much about at the beginning of the election campaign. So a message was sent to them.
We wonder however if that message was understood. Is there any indication in the throne speech that this government accepted and heeded the message sent by the Canadian people? I looked in the Speech from the Throne and I can only conclude that the answer is no. The government did not get it at all. We were expecting a national action plan, a plan that would set priorities and tell us how we would enter the new millennium.
What did we get instead? We heard from a government that wants to repent, a government that tells us it will reinvest money in certain programs. In which programs will the government reinvest? Can you believe that it will reinvest in health, after cutting spending in that sector by 35 per cent? It will reinvest in summer employment programs for students, after slashing them. It will reinvest in culture, after making cuts in that sector. And it will reinvest in post-secondary education, after reducing its support.
A few minutes ago, we witnessed something extraordinary. I was here in 1995. When the 1995 budget was tabled, the finance minister rose to announce that he would cut the scholarship program designed to encourage student excellence. This was in 1995. And do you know what happened, Mr. Speaker? I see the member for Rimouski, who was there as well, and the leader of the Bloc Quebecois. They all rose as they did this afternoon and applauded the Minister of Finance. This afternoon, the Prime Minister announced a new scholarship program. Guess what? They all rose together and applauded again.
That is what they did. But we did not applaud, because we were extremely sad to see such a good program being cancelled. What has changed in the meantime? Thousands of students have lost the financial support they needed to pursue their studies. Why? Because the government was shortsighted and unable to sort out its own priorities.
What has not changed is the docility of the Liberal backbenchers, who rise and applaud their Minister of Finance and their Prime Minister day after day.
This explains why there were 31 out of 32 from the Maritimes in the last Parliament. The people of the Atlantic provinces have said, “We've had enough of hearing the same old tune over and over, now we'd like to have people who will speak up for us, including the Progressive Conservative members in the Progressive Conservative caucus”. They will speak up for the people of the Atlantic provinces, since silence has reigned in recent years.
This same government is now talking about reinvestments and partnerships. But if this government understands what true partnership means, what is it waiting for to form a partnership in the area of health, to co-manage our federation?
This government had an opportunity with health care to demonstrate that it really believed in partnership instead of acting unilaterally. There is still an opportunity. The government could still sit down with the provinces and agree to national standards in health care. Nowhere is it written in the Constitution that it has to be decided by Ottawa and enforced by Ottawa.
Let me share a secret with the Prime Minister. His position on health care is untenable. He cannot cut the provinces by 35 per cent and then sit at the same table and say to them “I will run the show”. It is not going to work. The worst news is that it is not the Prime Minister's government or the provincial governments that will suffer. It is Canadians in waiting rooms, Canadians on waiting lists who are suffering from the Prime Minister's lack of leadership on this issue. They are paying the price.
We await the Prime Minister's partnership. We hope this time the words will be worth more than they were the last time they were spoken. The same is true for child poverty or youth policy. This Prime Minister invited us to give him some ideas on what we would do for young Canadians. I want to invite the Prime Minister today to look at the program, the platform we put forward in the last campaign.
We spoke of a youth policy with a clear objective where every young person should either be in school, in training, at work or doing community service. The national government can do something useful in that regard. You, sir, have the power to change the employment insurance system as it applies to young people. You do not have to ask anyone's permission. All you have to do is work with the provinces—