Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-375 today, brought forward by my colleague from the Bloc. The effect of Bill C-375, if passed, would prevent governments from engaging in the types of fiscal profligacies that governments have participated in in the past. It would prevent governments from incurring deficits except under extraordinary circumstances. The Minister of Finance would be more accountable to parliament for his monetary management.
In the 1997 election the PC platform called for making a law that politicians would have to balance the budget on an annual basis, legislation that would force governments to meet their budgets except in cases of wartime or economic crisis, and called for legislation that would cut the pay of the prime minister and cabinet ministers if they were to break that ban.
In our current platform and rooted in principles that we espoused during the time of the election, we are calling for lowering the debt to GDP ratio from 73% to 50%; a continuing low interest rate policy; cutting $12 billion in identified unnecessary expenditures; and balancing the books but not necessarily at the expense of health care or by raising taxes, which has been the way the government has achieved some of its dubious successes in recent years.
While the legislation deserves support from members of the House, it does not recognize the fundamental problem that deficits can be reduced and eliminated sometimes by making the wrong choices. The Liberal government has made many wrong choices in reaching a point at which we have a balanced budget.
By slashing health care, as the member from the New Democrat Party referred to; by maintaining unnecessarily and damaging rates of taxation which pummel small businesses and individuals and destroy initiative across Canada; and by maintaining the highest taxes of any of the G-7 countries that put our Canadian businesses at a competitive disadvantage to their counterparts in others countries, the wrong choices are being made.
Members opposite in the Liberal government certainly have some experience with deficits. It was under Liberal leadership that deficits grew from zero to $38 billion. My party cannot claim such a stellar record in building deficits. We only took one from $38 billion to $42 billion, which does not seem like quite the level of accomplishment the Liberals were able to achieve under their period of unprecedented fiscal irresponsibility.
Under Conservative governments the deficits between 1984 and 1993 were reduced from 9% of our GDP to 4.8% of our GDP by the time we left office. That took considerably well planned policy decisions that were courageous and involved the types of structural changes to the Canadian economy which were necessary not only to achieve deficit reduction then but to achieve deficit reduction since. I am talking about policies like free trade, the GST, deregulation of financial services, and deregulation of transportation.
It is through those types of structural changes, those types of forward thinking initiatives, that we were able to contribute to the deficit reduction battle. However, since 1993 those efforts have been combined with the slashing of health care and with the maintenance of unnecessarily high taxes. The government has put itself in the black by putting Canadians at an unprecedented high rate in the red. Canadians have the highest personal debt, the highest rate of personal bankruptcy in the history of the country.
Let us look at what has happened to students. Average student debt has grown from $12,000 back in 1993 to about $25,000 per graduate of undergraduate programs. The pages in the House have some benefits. They are in an enviable position in being able to work in the House and contribute so gallantly, as they do every day, to our proceedings. I am sure they have many friends who will be graduating with egregiously high debt loads. They will be harnessed to those high debt loads and held back as we enter the 21st century.
Fiscal responsibility has shifted. The deficits that used to be incurred by government are now being incurred by students like the peers of these stellar young pages, the stellar young public servants in the House tonight.
There is no valour in reducing the public deficit if it is at the expense of the fiscal health of individuals. We must continue to make the right decisions. I have some concerns about balanced budget legislation because it has the potential to contribute further to the ongoing trend of emasculating political bodies like parliaments. Parliamentarians should be more empowered to make the right decisions and I fear any legislation that reduces that power. Over the past 30 years we have seen a secular decline in the power of parliamentarians.
There are things we could do to increase the role of parliamentarians and to increase the scrutiny of public expenditures by the House. It was once the case that individual members of parliament debated line by line the estimates of various departments. That would increase the role of members of parliament as it would increase the level of scrutiny of expenditures. That would be a good move.
We could have a regulatory budget in the House whereby we could take a look at all regulations that are being proposed on an ongoing basis by bureaucrats within the system without being evaluated for cost. Those costs are very complex. Those costs involve the cost of implementation and the cost of enforcement, both of which are government borne. Perhaps most deleterious to Canadians are the costs of compliance which we never take into account.
Those are some of things we need to consider before we make new regulations. Those are the types of things we can do to increase the role of parliamentarians and at the same time have a greater level of scrutiny of public expenditure.
The balanced budget legislation has been successful in provinces like New Brunswick. Quebec had a deficit elimination bill starting in 1996 as well as Alberta and Saskatchewan. Manitoba passed the balanced budget, debt repayment and taxpayer protection and consequential amendments act in 1995. The cabinet minister who introduced that bill was a recent candidate for the leadership of our party, Brian Pallister. His bill was a very forward piece of legislation. It indicates the type of positive steps many of our provinces have taken to do the right thing.
However, at the federal level fiscal policy is extraordinarily complicated and complex. We are combining fiscal policy but there is also a monetary policy responsibility at the federal level. It is much more difficult for balanced budget legislation to be enforceable or tenable at the federal level. That is one difficulty. The American model goes back to 1985 when the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit reduction act established yearly deficit reduction targets.
All these things are very positive but nothing can replace leadership. Political leadership and political will can achieve far more than legislation that requires balanced budgets. We need to ensure we not only balance budgets in Canada but that we do so by making the right choices and the right decisions. We must ensure that as we enter the 21st century Canadians will not be encumbered by wasteful government but will be prepared to compete globally, to succeed globally and to put Canada at the cutting edge of an increasingly global market based society.